


The Hate That's in Your Head

by Ember_Keelty



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Mages and Templars, Tranquil Mages, absolutely all comments including concrit welcome, technically kidfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:53:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 30,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23045851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ember_Keelty/pseuds/Ember_Keelty
Summary: Cullen has an affair of sorts with Solona Amell in Kinloch Hold. It does not end well.Twelve years later, one of Solona's older sisters and a child who looks just like she did go searching for their family amid the chaos of the mage rebellion.
Relationships: Anders/Hawke, Female Amell/Cullen Rutherford, Jowan/Lily (Dragon Age)
Comments: 38
Kudos: 56





	1. Chapter 1

It all started innocently enough: Cullen had wandered down to the library while off-duty, and as he reached for a book, a smaller, unarmored hand reached out at the same time and struck against his own before hastily withdrawing. “Watch yourself,” he reminded the mage automatically — an all-purpose warning with no real anger behind it.

“Sorry,” said a sweetly familiar voice, and Cullen turned to see Solona Amell standing next to him. She smiled at him, her lips a thick, pink frame around her pearly teeth, and nodded her head in an apologetic little bow. “You can have it for now. I’ll just find something else to read and get out of your way.”

“Wait,” Cullen said — or tried to say, anyhow, but his mouth had gone dry. By the time he managed to spit the word out, Solona had turned and begun walking briskly away. She didn’t seem to hear him, and he didn’t trust himself to speak any louder without his voice cracking, so he strode after her and grabbed her wrist. “I apologize. I did not realize it was you there. You don’t have to go. You are—“ _so beautiful,_ he just barely restrained himself from saying “—more interesting than that dusty old book anyhow. I'm not here to read anything in particular, I'm just trying to pass some time. Truth be told, I've already forgotten the title."

"I see." She turned to face him. Her bright eyes — such a light shade of brown that they were almost gold — struck him with a look so intense it nearly knocked him off his feet. "But you know, this isn't really the best place for passing time. Anyone could wander by and see us, and then we'd get in trouble. If you want, I can show you to somewhere at least a little more private."

"Oh," said Cullen. "Oh, my." He had known that mages tended to be outrageously direct about such things. After all, he had only been on the job for a matter of weeks and already he'd had to break up pairs of them going at it in the sort of out-of-the-way nooks to which Solona was alluding. Still, finding himself the target of that directness, especially coming from such a lovely young woman, left him flustered. "I didn't mean... Then again, if _you_ mean..." His face felt hot. He became suddenly aware of the absence of his helmet, in much the same way that in certain nightmares he would become suddenly aware that he had stumbled out in public wearing nothing but his smalls. "That would be..."

 _W_ _atch yourself_ , he thought. Always solid advice, that, for Templars as well as for mages. He would like to think the best of Solona, and perhaps she really did mean no harm, but he couldn't risk it. A knight should be incorruptible.

"That would be highly inappropriate," he finished, chiding both the apprentice girl and himself.

"Ah," said Solona. "Yes, I suppose it would." She glanced downward, and Cullen followed the line of her gaze to his hand circling her wrist. He hadn't noticed how tightly he'd been squeezing until he saw the way her skin changed color beneath his grip. Maker preserve him, he was clinging like a panicked child.

He looked back up to see her staring at him again, that spark in her eyes undimmed even after all his fumbling and humiliation. It was unbearable, the way she stood so close, their hands almost touching, her gaze boring into him. It felt like torture by fire, and yet he struggled to make himself pull away.

When he did finally manage to release her, he could think of nothing to do or say that would restore even a scrap of his dignity. He offered her only an abrupt nod by way of farewell before turning tail and fleeing the scene.

—

In the following weeks, Cullen found himself more than usually grateful for the protection of his helmet, and made sure to keep it on whenever he went down to the first floor of the tower. He could not help staring at Solona whenever their paths crossed, but so long as she did not see his face, she would have no way of knowing there was anything more to it than a wary Templar performing his duty as was proper. She would have no way of knowing even that it was him.

Ironically, it was in the course of performing his duties that his propriety finally snapped. On a patrol of the halls, he heard some suspicious noises coming from a supply closet that ought to have been locked, and opened the door to find Solona backed against the wall, her eyes dark and her cheeks flushed, her pleasure-curled fingers wrinkling the hem of her skirt as she held it up to expose herself to the other apprentice kneeling at her feet.

Cullen did not give them time to react before grabbing the kneeling apprentice by the collar and dragging her up. Solona yelped in alarm and, mercifully, let her skirt fall back down before he saw more than the briefest glimpse of what lay beneath it.

"What do you think you're doing?" he asked the apprentice he held by the scruff. She was an elf, dark and slender and short enough that Cullen had to take care to avoid lifting her off her feet and choking her.

"Well, ser, I'm not doing anything _now_ ," the elf replied, her eyes wide and earnest, her frowning mouth obscenely wet.

"Let her go," Solona said suddenly.

Without even thinking about it, Cullen did. The elf took off running the moment she was free, and Cullen felt sorely tempted to do the same. He still flushed with shame whenever he remembered how he'd run the last time Solona had spoken to him, though, and was determined not to show weakness like that again.

"Do you just go about propositioning anything that holds still long enough?" he demanded of Solona. "Man or woman, human or elf, mage or not? Does it make no difference to you at all?" He could not imagine anyone less like himself than the girl he had just chased off.

"I'm sorry, ser, but I don't understand the question," Solona replied.

"What's not to understand? Just what kind of woman are you?" But she wasn't an ordinary woman at all, was she? She was a mage, a creature half made of volatile dream-stuff, something not entirely of this world even without a demon inside of her. Why did he keep forgetting that?

"I think I must be missing something, ser. I'm very confused. Is it possible you're confused too?"

That she would pretend to be so formal with him only added insult to injury, Cullen thought. Not even a month ago, she had asked him to bed with her, and now she was acting as though she didn't even know his name.

That was when he remembered that Solona could not see his face, and suddenly felt very foolish.

"Ah, well, now that you mention it..." Abashed but still determined to stand his ground, he removed his helmet. "I am," he admitted, "very, very confused."

Solona's eyes went wide, and her blush grew even deeper. "Ser Rutherford! I... apologize. For not recognizing you, and for wasting so much of your time on... on _highly inappropriate_ foolishness. I'll just... stop doing that now."

She moved to go, but Cullen was standing in the way of the door. He really should step aside and let her pass, he knew. He could let her be the one to run this time, since she seemed at least as embarrassed by all this as he was. The two of them could continue dancing around each other indefinitely, even as they remained holed up in the same tower with no means of avoiding one another. That would unquestionably be the most proper course of action.

In that moment, though, with his heart racing, and his face no less swelteringly hot for having taken his helmet off, and the image of Solona Amell pressed against the wall with her skirt lifted still seared into his mind, Cullen found he had difficulty remembering what in the world was so important about _propriety_.

He took a step forward. Solona took a step backward to match him. He took another step, and Solona backed herself into the wall. He closed the door behind him, and then closed the distance between them to kiss her.

Solona gasped into his open mouth. She seemed hesitant to open her own mouth, but he teased his tongue across her lips until they parted for him and let him taste the inside of her.

"Weren't you the one who said we shouldn't?" she asked him when he came up for air.

"We shouldn't," Cullen agreed, then moved to kiss her again.

"Wait!" Solona said, turning her head to the side so that he only got her cheek.

"What for?" he asked.

"Just... wait. Think it over. You're still a relatively new recruit. If you're caught, they won't have much reason not to cast you out of the Order entirely. In another year or two, you'll be more established. And I'll be a Harrowed mage so... so I'll have my own room, with more space than this and less chance of someone wandering by and overhearing. _You_ wandered by and overheard. It's a real risk."

"I wasn't wandering," he told her, taking her chin in his hand and turning her face back toward him. Maker but her eyes were beautiful. The look in them was smoldering, bright and hot as molten bronze. "This is part of my patrol. No one else is so likely to come by."

"Even so, it would be so much less dangerous to—"

"Solona!" It was the first time he'd ever called her by her given name, and he found himself all but moaning it. "There is no conceivable way that I could wait for _years_ when even these last few weeks have been a torment!"

They kissed again, and he fumbled with the straps securing the armor around his waist. Solona reached out to do the same, but her delicate, inexperienced hands were useless at the task and only got in his way until he grew frustrated enough to bat them aside. When he finally got his cock free, Solona reached for that, too. As tempted as he felt to simply let her have it, he feared that if she touched him now, he would be spent before he even got inside of her. In better circumstances that might have been fine, as he could simply have focused his attention on her while waiting to get it back up, but that would be a horribly awkward way to pass time in a cramped storage closet and with the fear of being discovered hanging over their heads. He took her wrists in his hands and pressed them gently but firmly against the wall above her head, and she seemed to get the message, because she kept her arms lifted as he reached back down to pull her skirt up.

Then he was inside of her, and he lost track of all his thoughts and simply _felt_. The inner walls of Solona's body pressed tight around his cock, but she was wet enough that he could penetrate her without much difficulty, even given that tightness. He rutted up into her, and she bounced with the rhythm of his thrusts, rising with him on the upstroke and then sliding back on the downstroke just slowly enough that she was still descending when he thrust up again, and the force with which they collided drove him in even deeper and made Solona gasp.

Cullen could not say how long he lasted. He came before he had quite gotten his head around just what he was doing. His own warmth gushed up into Solona and came lazily oozing back down around him. Solona made a breathy little sound of surprise and wriggled about on his cock. The way that she slid around him felt good in a different, more relaxing way than the frenzied heat of his earlier thrusting. At some point he had rested his hands around her waist to hold her steady against the wall, but now he found he was leaning against her to steady himself.

Cullen pulled out and looked up at Solona's face. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were closed and her pearly teeth worried at her lush pink lips. That all seemed natural enough; what really caught his attention was the ice that had spread from her hands over her arms where she held them above her head, pinning them to the wall like an especially thick pair of manacles.

"Don't do that!" he blurted out in alarm, and cast a cleanse to melt the ice. When it vanished, Solona's legs gave out beneath her and she collapsed to her knees.

"Sorry," she said. "I was just trying to hold myself up, that's all."

"That seems like a recklessly trivial use of magic!" Had she been open to the Fade the whole time that he was inside of her? Had there been demons tickling at her mind while they connected? The thought sent a chill down Cullen's spine.

"Sorry," Solona repeated. "I won't do it again."

"Have you done it before, though? Is it a habit of yours?'

"Not really, no. Most of this wasn't anything I'd done before."

"Wait a moment." That was when Cullen noticed the blood. "Don't tell me you're... _were_ a virgin?"

Solona straightened out her robes to cover herself up. "What do you think?"

"I haven't the faintest idea what to think," Cullen admitted. "I'm not... generally inexperienced... but much about this situation is new to me."

"I see," said Solona. "Well, the same thing is true about me."

Cullen did not see how it could really be the same thing at all, but he decided not to press the matter. Things had gotten awkward enough as it was. "I suppose I had better go before we're discovered," he said.

"That sounds like a solid plan," Solona agreed.

"Well then," Cullen said once he'd finished refastening his armor. "I'll... see you around." It was as much an uncomfortable statement of the obvious as it was a parting phrase. He exited the closet and stupidly waited a minute outside the door for Solona to follow him before realizing she was probably trying to make it so that they _wouldn't_ be seen leaving together.

"Right," he muttered to himself. "Back to the patrol."

—

At first Cullen believed that he had gotten Solona Amell out of his system, but gradually he realized that was not the case. He still found his eyes drawn to her when he passed her in the hall, and he still felt the occasional urge to reach out and take her by the wrist or to capture her mouth with his own, and he still thought sometimes — particularly when he was alone in his bunk — of going further than that. Now that he had a memory to replay and rework rather than needing to build the fantasy from scratch, though, his feelings for her had shifted from desperate desire to a more casual, familiar sort of fondness.

The next time he was alone in the library with her, he took off his helmet and kissed her. It came so naturally that he barely even thought about it, let alone fretted and panicked over it like he had the first time. They ended up back in the storage closet together, where Solona offered to go down on him, but it soon turned out that she was inexperienced at that as well. She did a wonderful job of working him up into a frenzy by running her tongue along the shaft of his cock and teasing the tip with her lips, but when he sought relief by thrusting into her mouth, she choked badly enough that he had to pull out. She suffered a fit of coughing so severe that Cullen worried she might throw up, but in the end she was able to stand, and Cullen once again buried himself in her muff and achieved release that way.

True to her word, Solona refrained from using magic. Between that and the practice he'd gotten, Cullen found when it came time for them to part that he was able to make a much smoother exit than he had before.

Their discreet rendezvous became such a regular occurrence over the course of the next few months that Cullen nearly forgot he had ever been anxious about such things. He only remembered later, when everything went wrong.

—

"Do you really like me?" Solona asked one day in the storage closet, turning her head to the side between kisses so that she could speak.

"I... what?" Once again, Cullen found himself at a loss for words. "What sort of a question is that?"

"Sorry, I know it's a strange thing to ask. It's just, you seem to have... singled me out. So I thought, maybe..."

"Maker's breath, of course I like you!" Cullen could not help but chuckle at her bashfulness. The tables had certainly turned, he thought, from when a simple proposition combined with the intensity of her stare had been enough to fluster him into fleeing. "You aren't like any other mage I've met. You're so... you just have this..." He struggled to find the right way to put it, and eventually settled on, "You have this sort of poise, or charisma. It's irresistible."

Solona turned her face forward again, her molten-bronze eyes radiant as they fell upon him. She drew in a slow, deep breath, holding his gaze the whole time. On the exhale, she blurted out, "I'm pregnant."

"You're what?" Cullen drew back from her so hastily that he smacked his head on the closed door. "How could you be—?" Well, _that_ was shaping up to be an utterly idiotic question. "I mean, I thought there were ways of preventing that!"

"There are," Solona said. "After the second time, I was able to find a charm, but I guess by then it was already too late."

"After the—?!" Cullen remembered that they were supposed to be hiding, and forced himself to whisper in order to avoid shouting. "Only after the second time?" It came out as a shrill hiss.

"It hadn't been a priority before then." Solona's voice, by contrast, was almost eerily flat and calm. "The Circle doesn't exactly hand them out like dinner rolls, and I didn't know that I would need one."

"You could have said something at the time!"

"Sorry," Solona said. "I did what I could after the fact, too, but it didn't work, and if I try any harder I might end up in the infirmary. Then everyone would find out for sure."

"Everyone would find out," Cullen repeated, trying without success to wrap his mind around what that would really mean. "Wait — maybe you _should_ go to the infirmary. There must be something that a healer could do."

"Could? Yes. Would? I doubt it. Have you _met_ Madam Everything-Happens-for-a-Reason up there? No, the only healer I'd trust with something like this is—" She cut herself off suddenly.

"Is who?" Cullen pressed her.

"Is unavailable."

"Then... we have to come clean, don't we?" Cullen realized. Something like a ball of ice dropped into the pit of his stomach, cold and hard and unignorable. "If we're going to be found out no matter what, it will be better if we don't try to hide it."

"We could run away," Solona suggested.

"No, we can't," Cullen said. He wondered whether this was what it felt like on the other end of a cleanse: the heavy chill of reality settling over him so suddenly that it made his head spin, snuffing out the warm and weightless dream he'd been living for the past months.

"Yes, we can! We can get into the basement and smash my phylactery, and then... then you just wear your armor and walk me out the door as though that's what you're supposed to be doing. You said you like me. You can _have_ me. Just please, please don't let them punish me for this."

"You're tempting me, aren't you?" Another stupid question. Of course she was. She always had been. When had he lost sight of that? "We _should_ be punished! I broke my vows for you! You somehow had me thinking it was harmless, but of course there were going to be consequences. Now that they've come to bear, you want me to abandon my duty entirely to protect you from them?"

"Your duty as a Templar, you mean?" Solona pushed off from the wall and drew so close she all but spat in his face as she said, "Do you _really_ think you're going to be one of those for much longer either way?"

Cullen's training kicked in and he shoved her away from him, channeling a silence through his hands as they connected with her chest. Solona bounced off the wall and just stood there for a moment, glaring wordlessly. Then her mouth cracked open into a gaping smile, and she cackled like a lunatic.

"So much for taking advantage of the situation!" she howled out, apparently no longer caring whether she was overheard. "So much even for making it hurt less! Oh, I have been so _stupid_!" Tears streamed down her face, but even choking on sobs did not put a halt to her crazed laughter. "Maker, help me! Maker, help me! No one else will!"

"Calm down," Cullen told her. When she did not respond, he slapped her lightly across the face, hoping that the sting would bring her back to her senses. It did nothing to curb her hysteria.

"Try swinging a little lower next time!" she shouted out at him between sobs and peals of laughter. "That might actually accomplish something!"

"I have no intention of _beating_ you! I am trying to help you calm down. You should come with me and confess to the Knight-Commander and First Enchanter without making them come get you. If anything might convince them to show lenience to you, it would be demonstrating contrition and rationality."

As though just to be as contrary as possible, Solona sunk down into a crouch, hugged her knees to her chest like a child, and howled even more wildly.

Baffled by her fit and helpless to rouse her from it, Cullen left to find the Knight-Commander himself. In a haze, he made his way to Greagoir's office and, finding it unlocked, let himself in without knocking.

The veteran knight was seated at his desk. "Who goes there?" he snapped at Cullen's abrupt entrance.

"It's Rutherford, ser. My apologies, ser." Then, before his nervousness could catch up with him, he continued, "I have made a terrible mistake..."

—

The Knight-Commander heard him out, then got a Tranquil to fetch the First Enchanter and a pair of Templars to fetch Solona. Cullen stood outside the office door as the First Enchanter arrived and went in to speak with Greagoir. He remained standing there when Solona, her face red but solemn, arrived flanked by two guards in full armor. She did not look at him while they stood waiting for their respective superiors to finish their conversation. Cullen knew this because he could not help himself from looking at her.

Finally the Knight-Commander called the two of them in. The guards remained outside, and Greagoir gestured for Cullen to close the door behind him, which he did.

It was Irving who spoke first. "I am very disappointed in you, child," he told Solona.

"Of course you are," Solona answered flatly.

"We have no need for preamble," the Knight-Commander chided them. "Solona Amell, a room will be made up for you in the mages' quarters, to which you will be confined for the duration of your pregnancy. Be grateful that circumstances conspired against you having to serve your sentence in the dungeons."

"Yes, ser."

"Show her out, Irving."

"Of course," the First Enchanter said, stepping forward and gently taking Solona's arm. He led her from the office and told the Templars waiting outside to come with him. One of them closed the door before following. Solona still did not look at Cullen even as the heavy wooden panel swung shut between them. The last that he saw of her — the last that he would see for many months to come — was the back of her head moving slowly away from him.

The Knight-Commander cleared his throat, demanding Cullen's attention. "Poorly done, Ser Rutherford," he said.

"I know, ser."

"I am reassigning you to an outpost in the Korcari Wilds. You will serve there until further notice."

Cullen sucked in a breath and willed himself not to flinch. The Wilds were the most dangerous and miserable place for a Templar in all of Ferelden, but still better than being discharged and cut off from lyrium.

"Try not to die out there, recruit," the Knight-Commander continued. "You did the right thing by coming clean. Took you longer than it should have, but better late than never. Everyone makes mistakes; maybe it's for the best to get yours out of the way early in your career. You're still young enough to turn this around."

"Thank you, ser," Cullen said, surprised at how genuine his superior's consolations sounded.

"Now go pack your affects," Greagoir told him. "Let's get you across the lake and on the road to Lothering by nightfall."

—

The Korcari Wilds proved every bit as cold and harsh as rumored. More than one of Cullen's brethren there simply vanished without a trace, and it was anyone's guess whether they had been taken by witches or Chasind warriors or wolves. They might even have been sucked down to their deaths by the quagmire itself.

The mages who haunted the wilderness were different from the ones interned at the Circle, even those who had only recently been arrested as apostates. The apostates here invariably turned to forbidden magic — or even to possession — rather than submit to arrest. In the three seasons he spent there, Cullen never saw even one of them taken alive. Arcane derangement, the Chantry scholars called it. Such was the fate of mages left to run amok without proper spiritual guidance. It seemed like an awful waste, but Cullen supposed that the only way to prevent it would be to settle the Wilds and civilize the Chasind, and that would likely take an Exalted March.

Cullen persevered. He survived whatever the Wilds threw at him, paying for his transgression in sweat and blood. He comported himself with honor, pressing out beyond the edges of the known world to tame the threat of magic that lurked there without ever once complaining of the toll it took on his mind and body. Bit by bit he earned his redemption in the eyes of his superiors, and before a year had passed he received orders to return to Kinloch Hold and reassume his post there.

—

Greagoir welcomed him back, and in the next breath ordered him to fetch Solona and escort her to the Harrowing chamber.

"Find whatever closure you can," the Knight-Commander said. "But do _not_ keep us waiting."

Solona had not yet been moved back to the apprentice quarters. When Cullen approached her bed in the dormitory where she'd been confined and let the light of the glowstone he carried fall across her fitfully sleeping form, he could instantly see why. Her body was bloated, her skin pallid, her hair matted with sweat. Whatever the pregnancy and delivery had done to her, she had clearly not yet recovered from it.

Cullen pushed through his revulsion and shook her awake. "It's time to go," was all that he could think to say.

Solona did not even say that much. She simply groaned as she pulled herself out of bed and onto her own unsteady legs. She didn't so much walk toward the door as lurch. She nearly fell before reaching it, and Cullen had to catch her and wind his arm beneath her shoulders to support her.

"Harrowing time?" she asked as he half-carried her toward the stairs leading up the tower.

"You don't have to do it, you know," Cullen told her. "There is no shame in acknowledging your limits. The Tranquil play a crucial role in the Circle, and anyone who demeans them for that simply doesn't understand—"

"I know what my options are, ser," Solona interrupted. "I have had very little to do these past months besides think them over. And over, and over, and over! The first choice was: do nothing, or do _something_. When I couldn't decide, I thought, 'Well, why not leave it to chance? Boy or a girl — that's the same as flipping a coin.' But then, of course, I had to choose which would be which. At first I thought, 'Well, if it's a girl, and if she turns out to be a mage, then she could end up like me.' But being a boy and a mage has all but one of the same risks. And it will be raised in a Chantry orphanage, won't it? So if it were a boy, and if he turned out _not_ to be a mage, then he would certainly end up like you."

Cullen flinched. That was the first indication Solona had given that she recognized him, and still her voice betrayed no fondness in that recognition.

"I knew which of those I would rather prevent," Solona continued, apparently oblivious to Cullen's discomfort. "After all, if my life were really _that_ bad, I wouldn't be dithering and setting conditions, would I? Which of course also means I might not have done anything even if it had been a boy, but it was nice to have an excuse when the time came."

"I barely understand a word you're saying," Cullen said.

It had been a girl, though. He was fairly sure he understood that much. Somewhere out in the world, Cullen had a daughter. He had no idea how to feel about that, aside from vaguely light-headed.

"Are you surprised?" Solona asked. "I haven't had much chance to talk to anyone in ages."

"You don't sound well."

"That would be because I'm not."

"Solona, please!" They were most of the way up the stairs when the outburst overtook him. "Don't you understand? They are going to make me be there! There is still one way out, and I am begging you to take it! If you ever cared for me at all, then please, please don't make me kill you!"

Solona looked at him — a bit vacantly at first, but then she smiled, and for just a moment her eyes lit up with some of the old fire. "Don't worry," she said, "I swear I won't let it end like _that_." Then she slipped away from his supporting arm and leaned heavily against the railing as she dragged herself up the last few steps.

—

That night stretched on for an eternity. Ignoring Cullen's earlier pleas, Solona immersed herself in the lyrium font and fell into a trance. Cullen could do nothing but stand watch over her motionless form with a hand on the hilt of the sword at his waist and try to convince himself that all would be well.

 _Better to get it over with_ , he told himself. If seeing her fallen so low was such a torment to him now, then why in Andraste's name would he want to drag that torment on indefinitely? Besides, he was practiced enough with a sword that he knew once he drew it he could leave aside the strain of thinking and act on instinct. He had little such practice with a brand. This way, unlike the other, he could be with Solona right up to the bitter end. This way, he could take responsibility and lay his mistakes to rest with his own hands.

When Solona cried out and flinched as though under attack from some unseen enemy, Cullen's hand tightened around his sword and his heart jolted so violently that physical pain shot through his chest. When she grew calm again, he swore under his breath and tried with little success to brace himself for the next shock. As the night wore on it happened, once, twice, three times. The fourth time her cry sounded different, and her eyes shot open.

Nothing happened. Her body did not distort any further than the months over which they'd been parted had already distorted it. The rune drawn on the floor around her did not react as though to the passage of a demon through the Veil. For a minute Solona lay gasping like a fish torn from the hook. Then she stilled and drifted off into a natural sleep.

Greagoir assigned a different Templar the task of carrying her back to her bed, and Cullen could not say whether he felt more relief or disappointment.

—

The next few days passed peacefully enough. Cullen refamiliarized himself with Kinloch Hold, while Solona mostly stayed in her room to rest. They avoided each other about as well as was possible for two people living in the same building. Cullen knew perfectly well that couldn't last, but even so, what happened next came as a shock.

Someone claimed to have heard an explosion in the basement. Greagoir took Cullen and a couple other Templars to investigate. There they found Solona Amell, along with an apprentice and a Chantry sister, slinking out from the phylactery repository through a door that ought to have been impassible.

Cullen hadn't fully wrapped his head around what he was seeing when the situation began to escalate too quickly for him to keep pace with it. The other Templars stepped forward to apprehend the miscreants. The apprentice made a sudden move, and Cullen couldn't make out what he was doing, but he did see Solona grab his wrist and drag him back behind her. She stood between the Templars and the other two and screamed out the last word that Cullen would ever hear her voice speak:

"Mouse!"

He barely had time to wonder what in the world she could mean — _Is that supposed to be a distraction?_ — before the change occurred. Solona's body seemed to unfold, more than doubling its height and turning partway inside out in the process. In the next moment, Cullen was blinded by a flash of light, deafened by a clap of thunder, and knocked to the ground by the electric shock that tore through his body from his head to his heels.

He regained his hearing before his vision, and an inhuman voice that vibrated through his skull like the lightning had vibrated through his flesh roared out, "Run, apprentice! Leave the Templars to a _real_ mage!" A woman screamed. A hail of footsteps pattered toward him, then past him and away.

The abomination made no sound as it lunged toward him, but he could feel its presence drawing nearer. Then its claws closed around him tightly enough to crumple the metal of his breastplate, and the ground fell out from beneath him, and the heat and stench of the monster's breath flooded in through the eye slot of his helmet.

"That bucket can't hide you from me now, Ser Rutherford," it crowed. "I can sense the bond that ties me to you." Its teeth clamped down around his helmet with a sound like the end of the world. Cullen felt a cloying wetness dribble down his face and could not tell if it was his own blood or some manner of fluid from the creature's mouth, nor could he tell which of those possibilities horrified him more.

"I knew that Templars would be filling!" The abomination's voice rung around him, not muffled in the slightest by its mouth being full. "Such arrogance! Even _I_ listened when the mage made her case that we should wait!"

The claws tugged in one direction, and the teeth in another. Cullen felt his neck stretch to the brink of snapping. How could the end have come so suddenly? And now of all times, when he'd just begun to relax after surviving the Wilds? And Solona — this thing had been Solona just a moment before. Though Cullen had always known what she was, had always known what mages were, had seen the change come over them often enough when he'd been in the South that it should no longer have startled him, the shock of seeing it come over _her_ — and after her Harrowing even! He'd been almost prepared for it then, like he'd been almost prepared to be eaten alive in the Wilds! — was as real as the shock of the sound and the stench and the lightning.

The abomination roared. A wave of something wet and foul lashed against Cullen's face, filling his perforated helmet. He fell, and he struck the ground hard, and he sputtered to get whatever it was out of his nose and mouth so that he could breathe. His helmet came off, somehow, and someone called his name. The world recoalesced into something resembling coherence, and he looked up to see Greagoir standing over him panting heavily, covered in gore, and leaning against his sword as though on the brink of collapsing.

The abomination that had been Solona was gone.

—

Cullen learned the details of what had happened later, after he left the infirmary. He likely would have been able to piece together most of it himself if he'd thought about it, but that was the absolute last thing he'd wanted to do while recuperating.

Solona and a Chantry initiate from the Circle's chapel had aided an apprentice accused of blood magic in raiding the basement repository and destroying his phylactery. When they were caught, Solona had either become possessed or revealed a demon already possessing her. The abomination had killed two Templars — no one Cullen knew well, since they had joined the Order while he was serving in the Wilds. That likely also meant they were no older than he was, so the relief he felt when he did not immediately recognize their names was quickly quashed by guilt.

The Knight-Commander had survived the lightning thanks to the many years worth of lyrium built up in his body, and had pulled himself off the floor and struck down the demon while its attention had been fixed on Cullen. The blood mage and the initiate had escaped in the chaos.

Cullen was resting in the barracks and trying to wrap his mind around it all when a Tranquil approached him. "Are you Ser Rutherford?" she asked.

"I am," he said. "Does the Knight-Commander wish to speak with me?"

"Not that I am aware of," the Tranquil said. She held out a slim, loosely bound book, the sort that a mageling might use for keeping notes. "While stripping Apprentice Jowan's bed, I discovered this in his mattress. I did not know what ought to be done with it. Since it contains your name, I will leave it to you."

"My name?" Cullen wondered aloud as he took it from her. "Why in blazes was the maleficar writing about me?"

When he cracked the book open, though, it took him less than a minute to realize that this was not the blood mage's journal. It was Solona's, and the very first pages of it described their first encounter in the library all those many months back.

Cullen tore his eyes away from the achingly familiar tale and raised his head to question the Tranquil further, but she was already out the door. Tranquils usually moved deliberately and often had to be reminded to pick up the pace, so it came as a bit of a shock to see one making such haste without being told.

Returning his attention to the diary, Cullen flipped through the pages and discovered that every last entry was about him. The accounts of his trysts with Solona were short and cursory, the details scant enough to be more racy than outright pornographic, but she must have gone through considerable risk and effort to record even this much. The entries ended just shortly before Cullen's banishment, though there was no mention made of the pregnancy.

Had the maleficar stolen this journal from Solona's effects when she'd been confined upstairs? Or even before that? Had he somehow used it to take control of her? Had the coldness she had shown to Cullen upon his return been the influence of blood magic? Or even her erratic behavior when she'd told him she was with child? Was such a thing possible?

He would probably never know. For all the questions Cullen had, there was nothing to be done but lay them to rest and try to move on with his life.

Cullen closed the book and, after a moment's thought, stashed it away in his own mattress. If nothing else, surely its existence proved that Solona had at one time wanted him as he'd wanted her — in her own mystifying, inscrutable way. He would hold onto that.


	2. Chapter 2

It was Cadence who first brought the child to Dinah Amell's attention. All three of them happened to be in the library of the Jainen Circle at the same time. The child was reading, Dinah was organizing and dusting the shelves, and Cadence was watching Dinah.

"There she is," Cadence said. "The apprentice everyone says looks just like you did at that age. She really does, doesn't she?"

Dinah turned her attention away from her work for long enough to see where Cadence was pointing. "Yes, she does," she agreed, and then went back to cleaning.

"Her name is Charity," Cadence continued. "No family name. She was obviously raised by the Chantry. Poor girl. They stuck her with something even worse than they did to me."

"You are probably right," said Dinah.

"You did say that you have sisters at other Circles," Cadence persisted. "She could be your niece."

"Yes, that seems likely," said Dinah.

Cadence made a noise from her throat. It was not a pleased-sounding noise.

"I apologize if I have displeased you," said Dinah. "What is it that you require of me?"

"Nothing," said Cadence. "Nothing at all, ever."

"And yet, you spend a large portion of your time watching me work," Dinah observed.

"I'm sorry," Cadence said, for no discernible reason. "Is that... unpleasant for you?" she asked, so Dinah supposed it must have been a preemptive apology.

"No. It is merely puzzling, since you do not seem to enjoy my presence anymore. May I ask why you do it?"

"Of course you may," Cadence said hastily. "Give me a moment. I do want to answer you, but it's not easy for me to put into words. I think in part it's just habit at this point."

"Are you looking for an opportunity to engage with me in our previous 'habit'?" Dinah tried guessing, even though it did not strike her as particularly likely.

"What? No! Of course not." Cadence stood up from her chair and shifted about agitatedly. Dinah thought that she was probably about to leave the area. She was probably not about to strike her, as that was not something Cadence had ever done before, so Dinah did not set down the books she had been carrying, but merely paused in carrying them so that she could keep an eye on the disturbance. After less than a minute, Cadence sighed and returned to her chair.

Dinah resumed moving the books.

"I'm sorry," Cadence said again, even though she had barely interrupted Dinah's work at all. Had she always been so quick to apologize? Dinah could not remember. She supposed it was probably nice of Cadence to be so polite to someone who had no means of demanding it from her, but it was hard to say for sure, as Dinah also could not remember the full emotional significance of politeness. She recalled it being quite complicated. "I can stay calm. What was I saying? Right, about watching you. Another reason is that I like to keep track of you, because no one else does. I mean, if people are cruelest when no one's paying attention, then someone ought to pay attention. I know I can't really protect you. I already failed to really protect you. But maybe it's better than nothing."

"It probably is," said Dinah. "At least as far as I am concerned. Though perhaps if you were to do nothing for me, you would be able to do better overall."

"I don't want to do better overall," said Cadence. "At least, not in any of the ways I have a chance of succeeding at. I want to do what I can for you."

"I see," said Dinah. "Thank you."

Cadence allowed her to work in silence for a few minutes before asking, "Do you remember the promise we made each other before they took me away to be Harrowed?"

"I do," said Dinah. Was that another reason Cadence watched her? If so, that could become a problem. "I would prefer if you did not fulfill it."

"I figured you would say that now," said Cadence. She smiled, though Dinah could not imagine that she found anything about this conversation pleasant. "That's been my main excuse, really. Of course, I'm also afraid of what would happen to me afterward, but it wouldn't really matter at that point, because what would I do with myself if I didn't have you to look after? But even when I decide I'm ready, I still end up chickening out, because I don't want to have to fight you for it. It would be hard enough even without that."

"Did you not think of that when you first proposed it?" Dinah asked.

"I didn't," Cadence admitted. "I probably wasn't thinking very clearly in general. I was just so terrified."

"As I recall, I was not thinking clearly either," Dinah said. "You asked for a promise from me. For reasons I cannot remember, I did not feel that I could refuse. Also for reasons I cannot remember, I felt it was important that the agreement be mutual."

"Because you were afraid too, right?" said Cadence. "You didn't want to be Tranquil. Isn't that the reason?"

"It is true that I did not want to be Tranquil," said Dinah. "However, I also did not want to die. My fear was not the same as yours, so I do not understand why I chose to imitate you."

"To imitate me? Are you seriously saying that you never really meant it? That even when you were scared, you didn't... want my help?" Cadence appeared increasingly distressed. Dinah could not understand why. Perhaps she was feeling again the way she had felt in the memory they were discussing. People sometimes did that, and it never failed to confuse matters.

"Yes," said Dinah. "That is what I am saying."

"I can't believe that!"

"Why not? It stands to reason, if you consider that I could still feel when I chose to be made Tranquil."

"That wasn't much of a choice they gave you!"

"It was enough of a choice to be relevant here. I could have chosen to die instead, and I did not."

"I can't believe this." Although the wording was similar to Cadence's earlier statement, the tone was completely different. "I mean, I knew that, of course. It's been one of my excuses for chickening out. But I thought... I don't know, that they must have pressured you, or you just had a moment of weakness you couldn't take back, or _something_ that would mean my promise still mattered. All these years, has it really not mattered? Have I just been hanging on for nothing?"

"I do not understand what you are asking. I can only say that I would prefer to remain alive, even in this condition. As you said earlier, something is better than nothing. I remain convinced of that. It is an irreducible, unreasoned conviction, perhaps the last remnant I have left of the feelings that used to direct my actions."

"A remnant?" Cadence's eyes widened. "I never thought of it that way, but it would make sense, wouldn't it? Why else would you ever bother doing anything at all? And if that's the case, then..." She looked down at the table and made a sound that might or might not have been a sort of laugh. "Then even if you had meant what you said back then, you've changed your mind now. It's not just that someone is forcing you to say that of course you want to stick around to be free labor for them."

"Correct," said Dinah. "Since you understand that, can I assume that you will not be a danger to me?"

"That's the last thing I want to be." Cadence looked back up to reveal that she was smiling. "So that's it, then. One little conversation settled all those years of doubt. I should have just talked to you earlier."

It occurred to Dinah that she, too, could have asked much earlier about Cadence's behavior. While Cadence clearly found speaking to Dinah unpleasant, she never took her negative feelings out on Dinah — not physically, anyhow, and though sometimes Cadence's verbal outbursts crossed some mysterious line that made her seem ashamed of herself afterward, Dinah was incapable of being hurt by them. So Dinah had never consciously refrained from asking, but she had also never prioritized finding an opportune moment to ask. Apparently, that had been a dangerous mistake. She was fortunate that one of their occasional, aimless conversations had just happened to meander down the right path before Cadence had acted on faulty information.

Cadence sighed heavily, interrupting Dinah's musings. "But I guess that's also why I _didn't_ talk to you earlier," she said. "Knowing for sure what I have to do means that I actually have to do it."

"Did we not just conclude that there is nothing you have to do?" Dinah asked.

"Exactly. Which means that there's nothing left but to go on ahead without you." She let out another shaky laugh-like sound. "It's really strange. Suddenly I'm not scared at all. It's sad and lonely, but not frightening. I guess when it's as good as done, there's nothing left to be scared of."

"That is strange," Dinah agreed.

Cadence's smile wavered. "You're not even going to try to talk me out of it, huh?"

"I do not think that would accomplish anything," Dinah told her. Had Cadence not just said that it was as good as done?

"Right. Makes sense. You don't care if your niece is here. You won't care when I'm not." Cadence stood up. "Well, all right. Goodbye, Dinah."

"Goodbye," Dinah responded, though Cadence was already leaving in such a hurry that she might not have heard.

The mention of her probable niece stirred a sort of vague interest, and Dinah looked over to where she had seen Charity earlier. The child was no longer there, though, so Dinah put that thought aside and returned to her work.

Despite her apparent conviction, Cadence did not act on her decision until a few days later, when it was Dinah's turn to clean the mages' quarters. Later, it would occur to Dinah to wonder whether Cadence had intentionally timed things that way. In the moment, though, her mind went perfectly blank as she peered into the enormous globe of ice that had mysteriously appeared on top of Cadence's bed and saw her old friend kneeling motionless within it, her eyes closed, her hands pressed together as though in prayer.

Dinah found and alerted the nearest Templars, who returned with her to the room to cleanse away the ice. As they took the body out to burn it, Cadence's hands fell from their pose, and a folded scrap of parchment dropped to the floor from between them. Since no one else appeared to have noticed it, Dinah picked it up and examined it.

 _Thinking of you to the last,_ it said once unfolded. _You won't care, but I selfishly want you to know that anyway. I hope this is easier to clean than blood or ashes._ The note wasn't addressed to anyone, but Dinah thought it reasonable to conclude that she was the intended recipient.

It _was_ relatively easy to clean. That was nice of Cadence, Dinah supposed.

—

Years passed without Dinah having a reason to speak with the child, or even to pay her much thought. She would periodically be reminded of her existence when she happened to see Charity while cleaning or passing through the common areas. Usually when this happened, by the time Dinah noticed her, Charity would already be staring at Dinah. Dinah was reminded of how Cadence used to watch her, and wondered whether it might be beneficial to ask Charity about her intentions. She concluded, though, that even if Charity meant to harm her, she would be unlikely to succeed even with the advantage of magic. Additionally, Dinah did not know Charity as she had known Cadence, and so could not predict how she would react to anything Dinah might say to her.

Dinah did not normally pay much attention to rumors of what went on in the world outside of Jainen, so even when she gradually began to notice how many conversations she overheard from Templars and mages alike concerned Kirkwall and the Gallows, she did not put much effort into piecing together the meaning of the scattered snippets of information she was able to catch. She also did not believe that much effort was required. There had been a rebellion. There had been an Annulment. Simply putting together those two facts in that order likely covered the entire story.

Then the popular topic shifted suddenly and dramatically to the White Spire. The First Enchanter had traveled there and had not returned. There had been a massacre. There had been a battle. There had been a mass escape. There had been, some said, a cure for Tranquility. Every new mention Dinah heard of what had occurred made the whole mess sound all the more improbable and incoherent.

Dinah was cleaning the library and listening in on one such conversation between a Templar and a Chantry sister when she felt a tug on her sleeve and turned to see Charity looking up at her expectantly.

"There you are," Charity said. "Come with me."

"I have several more shelves to dust," Dinah informed her.

"This is more important," Charity said. She shifted up onto her toes, craned her neck, and lowered her voice before continuing, "Nora said to drop everything. She said not to take too long, but to try to grab another apprentice my age or younger or a Tranquil before meeting back with her. She said there's some new friends here, and we're going to play hide and seek. I don't know what that really means, but it's Nora saying it, so it's not going to be anything stupid."

"Do you mean Enchanter Nora?" Dinah asked.

Charity nodded.

Dinah considered this. An Enchanter did have some authority. If Enchanter Nora had come to fetch her in person, she would not have been able to refuse. Additionally, dusting one-handed would be difficult, and Charity did not appear inclined to let go of her arm.

She set her cloth down on the shelf, marking her place for when she returned to her work, and said, "I will go with you."

Charity led her from the library to a lecture room. On the way, Dinah noticed other young apprentices moving in the same direction. She noticed several Templars and Enchanters moving in the opposite direction, along with a group of soldiers in unfamiliar armor. Another two such soldiers stood beside the door to the lecture room, though they did not appear to be guarding it, as they allowed Charity and Dinah through without so much as a second glance.

Enchanter Nora was inside, as were a handful of apprentices and Tranquil mages. As minutes ticked by, more and more apprentices filtered in. Dinah counted them as they arrived, for lack of anything else to do. When forty-three people had crammed themselves into the room, Enchanter Nora closed the door.

Several of the apprentices said several things at once. One of them was, "We're all going to die, aren't we?" That was the one that Enchanter Nora addressed.

"We are certainly not going to die," she said. "Did you see the knights outside the door? They don't look like Templars, do they? That's because they are the king's men. They really are here to protect us."

The apprentices said several more things. One of them was, "Listen to her. Nora doesn't bullshit us." Then the apprentices stopped saying different things, and just said "Ooh!" and laughed.

Enchanter Nora said, "Ahem," and then said it over again until the laughter died down. "I _do_ try to be as honest with you as possible, though I would appreciate it if you did not phrase it like _that_ , Annabel. Now please keep your voices down so I can explain what is happening. King Alistair has been trying for years to make things better for mages, but the Chantry hasn't let him do much. Recently, though, some high-ranking Templars told the Divine that they won't do what she says anymore. Now the king has decided that Templars aren't allowed in Ferelden anymore, and because the Templar Order hasn't been cooperating with the Chantry, the Chantry isn't going to stop the king from kicking them out."

"No more Templars? Does that mean we can go home?" one of the apprentices asked.

"If you have family that can take you back, then yes," Enchanter Nora said. "The Senior Enchanters will continue to run the Circle for any mages who choose to stay here. And I don't know the details, but the king is also going to provide a place mages can go if they don't want to stay but don't have a home to return to."

"Are the Templars really going to listen to the king?" someone else asked.

"They won't have much choice," Enchanter Nora said. "It's hard to say how they'll react, but even if they try to fight him, we should be safe in here until it's all sorted out."

The apprentices had many more questions. Most of them were repetitive or irrelevant to Dinah, so she did not pay close attention to Enchanter Nora's answers. When someone asked, "Are you really my aunt?" it took her a moment to register that it was not part of the general discussion, but rather Charity directing a question to her.

"It is possible," Dinah said. "But I cannot know for certain."

"When I first got here, that one woman thought so, right? She pointed at me, and then she got really upset, and then she said something about you having a niece. Do you know why? Is it just because everyone thinks I look like you, or is there more?"

"You do look like me," Dinah said. "I also have at least two sisters who were taken to other Circles. Finally, children born in the Circle are raised in Chantry orphanages, and Cadence believed that you were likely raised in a Chantry orphanage."

"Well, she was right about that much," said Charity. "Do you know where this Cadence is now?"

"She is deceased," said Dinah.

Charity sighed and said, "Figures."

"That's really all I know," Enchanter Nora said from her position in front of the door. "But we'll all know more soon. Now, why don't we play a word game to pass the time? Let's see, what will work for this range of ages? How about one-word stories? I'll start, and then we'll zigzag back and forth across the room like this." She illustrated with a gesture of her hand. "The."

"Cat," said the apprentice standing in the front-left corner of the room, and soon everyone was distracted by the game. Person by person and word by word, a story began to form about a cat chasing a bird. Then it veered off and became a story about the bird flying from one location to another, rarely staying at any of them for longer than a sentence. Then one of the youngest apprentices introduced an explosion where it made neither grammatical nor narrative sense, after which the story spiraled off into complete incoherence while some of the apprentices laughed and others complained that they should start over and not let Aldy play next time.

Dinah remembered playing this game when she had been a child. She recalled that she had sometimes found it fun, but usually found it frustrating. Many of the apprentices playing it now sounded frustrated. Perhaps they had some expectation, as Dinah recalled she'd once had, of piecing together a meaningful story. That was not a reasonable expectation, nor could Dinah see why it was even desirable. After all, most of what occurred over the course of existence was more like these haphazardly constructed stories than the ones written to educate or entertain. One thing happened after another with little discernible logic, often to the point that it became impossible to describe in terms of discrete events. It would make as much sense to follow the path a droplet of water took through a flowing stream with the expectation of discovering its meaning.

Of course, these days even the sorts of stories that were supposed to mean something sounded that way to Dinah. She definitely recalled, though, that there had once been a time when they had been otherwise. She had far more difficulty recalling whether life had ever been otherwise.

Eventually there was a knock on the door. Then there was a pause, and then another three knocks in quick succession. Enchanter Nora opened the door, and a Fereldan soldier standing on the other side made a thumbs-up gesture. "Oh thank goodness," Enchanter Nora said somewhat breathily, but she wore a calm, neutral expression when she turned back around to face the crowd. She began giving very specific instructions to the apprentices regarding where they should go and who they should talk to in order to determine what would happen next, but did not address the Tranquil mages. After a while, one Tranquil man simply pressed forward through a gap in the crowd and exited the room. Enchanter Nora's only reaction to that was to nod at him as he passed by her, so Dinah followed his lead and left to resume her work.

Sometime later, Charity approached her in the library, this time carrying with her an assortment of items. "There you are!" she said. "Wow, you really just went right back to dusting after all of that?"

"I did," Dinah confirmed.

"Creepy," said Charity. She laid out what she had been carrying — an inkpot, some parchment, a quill — on one of the study tables. "Okay," she said as she uncapped the inkpot and dipped the quill. "You said you have mage sisters. What are their names? Have any idea where they are?"

"The oldest was named Susanne," Dinah told her. "I believe that she was taken to the Gallows."

Charity wrote down, "Suzann, Gallows." Dinah saw no particular reason to correct her spelling.

"The second was named Emilia," said Dinah. "The Templars took her as well, though I do not know where to. I was the third child. The youngest were a pair of twins, Solona and Daylen. I do not know whether they ever manifested magic."

Charity scribbled more notes down and then asked, "Did they all look a lot like you? The same way that I look like you, I mean."

"I do not know. It is difficult to recall their faces. I do remember being told on more than one occasion that there was a strong family resemblance, but I cannot recall those occasions in enough detail to say whether all five of us were being referred to, or only some subset."

"What about the family name?" Charity asked.

"Amell," said Dinah.

Charity dropped her quill. "Seriously? Like the Kirkwall Amells?"

"We were born in Kirkwall, yes."

"Really? You're an Amell? _I'm_ an Amell? Like in the story?" Charity clenched her hands into fists and shook them, but she did not seem to be angry.

"Which story?" Dinah asked.

"Oh come on!" Charity threw her head back and looked up at the ceiling for a moment before righting herself and glaring at Dinah. "You really don't know? That's so stupid! I usually have to hide myself if I want to hear anything good, but people talk around you like you're not even there. You could at least take advantage of that!"

"I sometimes do," Dinah said.

"Well anyway," said Charity, "you haven't asked why I want to know all this."

"I see no harm in answering your questions, regardless of your reasons for asking them," Dinah told her.

" _Well anyway_ ," Charity repeated a bit more forcefully, "it's because I'm leaving Jainen. With the group going to Redcliffe, I mean. I _really_ doubt the Chantry wants me back, and I don't want to go back there either. And the mages at the Calenhad Circle are going to be freed too, and I think there's a good chance that my mother is there, and that she'll go to Redcliffe looking for me, or that even if she doesn't there will be someone there who'll know where I can find her. See, the Chantry I was raised in was actually closer to Calenhad than Jainen, but they sent me here instead, and they can't care too much about more distant relations, because you're here at Jainen, so what else could it be?"

"It is true that the Chantry prefers not to have related mages living together," Dinah said. "However, for many purposes I am no longer counted among the living."

"So they might have overlooked you? Okay, so maybe my mother isn't at Calenhad but an aunt or uncle who's not Tranquil is. Either way, I want to find out, and now I'll know who to look for. So that's the main reason I asked. Aside from that..." Charity recapped the inkpot and looked the parchment over. "Suzann, Emilia, Solona, Dalen. They're all really nice names. Do you know if any of them have any kind of special meaning to our family?"

"As I recall, most of us were named after other people, either older members of the family or family friends. For example, I remember that Susanne was named after our great-aunt Susandra."

"Suzandra!" Charity shook her fists again. "I love that! Okay, I've decided. From now on, I'm going to be Suzandra Amell. That's what I want you to call me!"

"Suzandra Amell," Dinah called her.

"Great!" said Suzandra Amell. "But, um, you _do_ understand that I mean in general and in the future, not just right this moment?"

"If you are leaving, then I will not have many opportunities to call you anything in the future," Dinah pointed out.

"But you should come with me!" said Suzandra Amell. "Did I not say that yet? I guess I didn't. I want you to come with me!"

"You want to spend more time in my company?" Dinah asked. "Even though you find me creepy?"

"I don't find you creepy," said Suzandra Amell. "It's just that Tranquility itself is... Actually, no. That'll just sound like the Chantry sisters talking about me being a mage, so never mind. Yeah, you do creep me out sometimes. You won't mind my saying that, so I might as well say it. But that doesn't mean I hate you, or even that I dislike you. And maybe the rumors about a cure are true. I know not to get my hopes up, but if I go out there and find out they are, and meanwhile you're back here where I can't do anything about it, and so you're just stuck dusting bookshelves forever, then..." She trailed off, but in a tone that suggested she thought the conclusion was self-evident.

"Then what?" Dinah asked, because it wasn't.

"Then that will be bad, and I'll be really upset!" said Suzandra Amell.

"You want me to be cured," Dinah surmised. "But I suspect you may be even more upset if you bring me with you and do not find a way to make that happen."

"I won't," said Suzandra Amell. "I promise I won't. That's really, really not the point."

"Then what is the point?" Dinah asked.

"It's just..." Suzandra Amell fell silent for a moment and shifted her weight back and forth between her feet, causing her upper body to sway from side to side. "I want to look for a way to help, even if I never find it, as long as that doesn't make things worse, which I don't think it really can. I'm going to look for my mom the same way, and our other family too. Because everything's kind of weird and scary right now, but if I have a goal, then it's not like things are just happening to me again. It's more like I'm going on a quest. I know that's kind of selfish of me, but..." Suzandra Amell put on a small smile as she concluded, "Oh well?"

"You are seeking coherence in your reality," Dinah surmised.

"Huh?" said Suzandra Amell.

"You are attempting to impose meaning upon it."

"That sounds deeper than this probably is."

"Many things sound differently to you than they do to me."

"Okay? I don't know what else to say here. Will you go with me or not? I want you to go with me, and you don't have a lot of time to decide."

So Dinah decided then. It was a largely unreasoned decision, but since she did not have much to go on, deliberation would have been futile. "I will go with you," she said, "if I am allowed."

—

After speaking with the Enchanters, Suzandra Amell confirmed that Dinah was allowed. After speaking with Dinah again, she clarified that she wished to be called just Suzandra in situations where a surname was not required.

The journey to Redcliffe was an arduous one, even more so for the mages who were unaccustomed to physical labor than for Dinah herself. However, their caravan was well-provisioned and well-defended, and they arrived at their destination without any casualties. In the months that followed, escaped mages from beyond Ferelden began to gather in Redcliffe as well, and Dinah often heard that their traveling parties had not been as fortunate.

The Calenhad mages, by contrast, had only to sail across the lake, and so nearly the entire population of Kinloch Hold emptied out into Redcliffe. Suzandra busied herself asking around after any Amells who might have lived there, but all the mages she spoke to either could not or would not tell her anything useful. Dinah could not guess whether or not they were concealing information, as the way they looked at and spoke to Suzandra could just as easily have been the product either of guilty discomfort or of pity for an orphan who had not yet learned better than to hope.

When Suzandra first began asking the same questions of mages arriving from Ansburg, they reacted with undisguised horror and refused to say anything. It was as obvious to Suzandra as it was to Dinah that they were hiding something, and so for a few days she developed a habit of following them around and repeatedly demanding they answer her. Some of her targets stoically ignored her as they would a chatty demon, while others fled the moment they caught sight of her.

Finally, one mage from Ansburg approached Suzandra rather than the other way around. "You need to stop this," he told her. "If you really are an Amell, you'll be better off keeping that to yourself."

"I might if you explain what you mean by that," Suzandra told him.

"Fine, then. There _was_ an Emilia Amell at Ansburg. After the the Gallows uprising, when word got out about what the Champion of Kirkwall had done, a Templar up and murdered her while shouting how her whole family's cursed beyond hope of redemption. It was right out in the open, and no one even tried to stop him. They did expel him from the Order for it, but even after that you'd hear the other Templars saying they couldn't blame him, or some even calling him a hero." His gaze had shifted off into the distance as he spoke, but he took a deep breath and refocused on Suzandra before concluding, "So _that_ is what I mean by that."

Suzandra did not respond promptly, so Dinah asked the obvious next question for her. "Did Emilia ever give birth while living in the Circle?"

The mage twitched as though startled before lifting his head to face her, but he sounded composed enough when he answered, "No, she didn't. Not that I know of, anyway, and you wouldn't think even the Circle could cover up something like that." Then he looked back down at Suzandra. "Any other questions? Best get them all out of your system now. I won't be discussing this again."

"No, I think that's it," Suzandra said, putting on a smile. "Thank you for your honesty. I promise not to bother anyone from Ansburg anymore." Before he could respond, she grabbed Dinah's hand. "Come on, Aunt Dinah. It's been days since we last had a chance to go down to the lakeshore. Let's see if any good rocks have washed up there."

Dinah allowed Suzandra to lead her away down the hills to the water below. As usual, in the places where the road was rough, Suzandra made no attempt to keep to the smoothest path but rather climbed up onto the jutting boulders that lined it and hopped from one to the next. Also per usual, she slipped more than once but never fell far enough to break anything, and the sturdier clothes she had acquired since leaving the Circle protected her skin from getting scratched up.

They reached the lakeshore, and Suzandra began collecting pebbles while Dinah watched her. Though they had done this several times before, Dinah remained uncertain what precisely made a rock "good". Unusual colors seemed to catch Suzandra's attention as she combed the shore, as did reflective or translucent lusters. She also tended to prefer round, smooth stones over jagged ones. However, none of these qualities were either necessary or sufficient for Suzandra to deem a rock worthy of being added to her collection.

On this occasion, unlike previous ones, once Suzandra had filled her pockets she did not return to camp to add the pebbles to her stash, but rather stood facing the lake and began hurling them into it one by one.

"Are they not good rocks?" Dinah asked her.

"They're okay, I guess," Suzandra said, but continued to toss them. "I'm the one that's no good. You've seen the normal kids skipping stones out here, right? I've tried watching them to figure out how they do it, but it's not working. I kind of want to ask them, but they would probably just run from me, or if they didn't they might get in trouble, because even the normal adults run." Having emptied her pockets, she scooped up more stones from the ground around her feet and began throwing them as well. "And now I've even managed to chase away some grown mages. Maybe I _am_ extra cursed, huh?"

"If you want the stones to bounce across the surface of the water, you might try freezing a strip of it," Dinah suggested.

"That would be cheating. Besides, what if I messed up and froze too much of it or something? That would probably get me in trouble even without Templars around." Suzandra tossed the last stone she had on hand and leaned down as though to pick up more, but then seemed to change her mind and sat down instead. "Ugh, that's damper than I thought it would be. And now my clothes are all wet, obviously. Good job, Charity. No common sense at all. Can't do anything right." Despite that complaint, she did not stand back up but rather pulled her knees to her chest and folded her upper body over them.

When after several minutes Suzandra did not move or say anything else, Dinah surmised that this might be a problem that she would have to fix. She did not entirely understand the nature of the problem, and clearly it was far more complex than a lack of good rocks, but the rocks did seem to play some part in it, so Dinah collected a handful of them before approaching Suzandra. "Are any of these good ones?" she asked as she crouched down next to her.

Suzandra threw herself against Dinah's chest, wrapped her arms around her waist, buried her face in the crook of her neck, and sobbed. "Rocks are stupid!" she cried out. "I only like them because I'm stupid too! Stupid, stupid, stupid!"

"You have never seemed stupid to me," Dinah told her.

"That's because _you're_ stupid!"

"There are many things I find difficult to comprehend," Dinah admitted. "At this moment, for example, it occurs to me that I do not know how to comfort a crying child. I have only the vaguest and most uninstructive memories of what my father used to do for me, and I have no memories at all of what my mother did."

"Just hold me," said Suzandra.

Dinah folded her arms over Suzandra's back. "Is this correct?"

"Thank you," said Suzandra. That was not a confirmation, but nor was it a complaint, so Dinah maintained that position until Suzandra stopped crying and said that they should return to camp and get something to eat.

After that, life settled into a more predictable rhythm for a while. Suzandra stopped seeking out and questioning not only the Ansburg mages but also the refugees from other Circles. Dinah slept, ate, and did whatever work was asked of her, and that work now seldom included accompanying Suzandra all around the village at unpredictable hours. It was not so different from her life back at Jainen.

"Have you changed your mind about being on a quest?" she asked Suzandra at one point as they did the laundry together.

"Nothing's changed," Suzandra said. "I'm just taking a break, that's all."

"You have not been resting," Dinah observed. "You have been following me around camp and helping with whatever chores I am told to do."

"Yeah, I have. So what?" Suzandra increased the force with which she scrubbed the wet robes against the washboard to the point that they likely would have torn had they been as flimsy as the ones worn by apprentices in the Circle.

"That is not what I understand 'taking a break' to mean, unless perhaps your questing was more tiring for you than chores. I myself did not find it so very arduous, but perhaps I have some capability that you do not of which I am unaware."

"It wasn't _tiring_ , exactly," said Suzandra.

"Then I do not understand," said Dinah.

"Of course you don't," said Suzandra, and then went silent for long enough that Dinah assumed the conversation was over. Later, however, when they had finished the scrubbing and dumped out the basins, she continued, "I thought I'd go on a quest to find my family, but if all that's left is ashes, then that's all I'm going to find. And that's fine, I guess. I can be questing for answers instead of people. But that means once I know the answers, there will be nothing left."

That sounded familiar, in a roundabout way. It took Dinah a minute to recall what it reminded her of. "You are chickening out," she finally realized.

"Excuse me?" Suzandra said, sounding angry.

"I mean no offense," Dinah reassured her. "In my opinion, that is a good thing."

"Really?" Now Suzandra sounded confused. "But you _never_ have opinions about things being good or bad."

"You want for there to be something left," said Dinah. "Something is better than nothing."

"Oh," said Suzandra. "Yeah. Maybe you do sort of understand a little. But... I do have to see it through to the end eventually, so don't think I won't."

"Of course," said Dinah, because if Suzandra were no longer seeking anything, that would also mean that she had nothing left to find.

"I haven't given up," Suzandra insisted. "I'm just taking a break."

—

More months passed. More mages arrived. The conversations Dinah overheard shifted. Discussions of which Circles were falling which way dried up, and Dinah realized that there were no Circles left to fall. There were rumors of Templars gathering in the countryside to attack Redcliffe, and the rebels from the White Spire came to defend it. Or, some said, it was the other way around: Fiona's rebels had decided to gather at Redcliffe, and the Templars had followed them.

The villagers complained of Templars beating and murdering countryfolk who'd had nothing to do with the mages. They complained that the mages fighting them back destroyed homes and crops with their battle magic. They said that mages and Templars should go have their war somewhere it wouldn't kill innocent people and create refugees. They said the word "refugees" in a different tone than they had before and stopped calling Dinah's home a refugee camp. Now they called it the rebel mage camp.

Because of all this, when what appeared to be a farming couple approached Suzandra and some other young mages where they were playing at the edge of camp, Dinah surmised that there might be a problem and moved quickly to where she could keep a closer eye on the situation.

"Sorry, I know this must be strange," the man was saying as Dinah came into earshot. "But if you could even just point me in the general direction of someone who-" Then he stopped and stared.

"Hello, Dinah!" said Suzandra. The man blinked in surprise, then looked down and stared at her too.

"Lily," he said to his woman companion, "are you seeing what I'm seeing, or is this some Fade nonsense?"

"I see it," said the woman. "Dear Maker, I see it. Could that girl be Solona's..? But the Tranquil woman can't possibly be _her_ , can it?"

"Dinah was her closest sister's name," said the man. "She always said she wished I could meet her family." He laughed, but he did not sound happy.

Suzandra grabbed each of them by one of their hands. "Come with me right now," she commanded. "You too, Dinah. Everyone else, leave us alone."

"I guess our business will just have to wait," the man said as he and Lily let Suzandra lead them off into the camp.

Some of the other children followed. "Suzandra, you spend too much time with your _aunt,_ " one of them said with a notable shift in tone on the final word. "You can't just boss around everyone like we're all Tranquil."

"Leave her alone," the oldest girl said. "Can't you see how personal this is? Let's all make use of our privacy, now that we have it." She succeeded in pulling two of the younger children away, but the one who had complained of Suzandra's bossing kept following, no matter how Suzandra yelled at him to stop. Then Dinah turned around and reached out a hand to prod his face, and he yelped and ran off in the opposite direction.

"Idiot," Suzandra said. "It's not _communicable_."

"Can't say I blame him," the man muttered.

"Levin," said Lily.

The four of them found some unoccupied log benches and sat down to talk, Dinah and Suzandra on one log, the strange man and woman on the other, the two pairs facing each other. "I'm Suzandra Amell," Suzandra said, "and this is my aunt, Dinah Amell. You knew my mother?"

"If your mother was Solona, then yes," said the man. "I grew up with her in Kinloch Hold."

"I _knew_ she was at Calenhad," Suzandra said, but did not sound particularly happy about having been right.

"Oh," said the man, "before we get any further, this is Lily, my wife, and I'm... Well, I suppose I'd better still be Levin. It just seems a bit odd, if we're going to talk about back then."

"You changed your name?" Suzandra guessed, perking up a bit. "I did the same thing! The one the orphanage gave me was so bad. Clergywomen have awful taste in _everything_."

Lily frowned slightly at that. Levin laughed, and though it was a short laugh, it sounded genuinely amused.

"Are you yourselves mages?" Dinah cut in to ask. "I had guessed that you were farmworkers, considering how you are dressed, tanned, and muscled."

"Er, well, _I'm_ a mage, yes," Levin said, still looking at Suzandra rather than Dinah as he spoke. "Lily, though..."

"I'm an apostate in the ancient sense of the word," Lily said, picking up the explanation when her husband trailed off and turned to her. "I was working in the Circle's chapel when I first met Levin."

"Oh," said Suzandra. "Sorry."

"Don't worry about it," said Levin. "No use pretending she has good taste after she went and married me."

"There you go again," Lily told him. "I knew you would turn it into that, but it's still not true." She laid a hand against Levin's shoulder and left it there even as she turned back to Suzandra and Dinah. "Anyhow, we _were_ farmworkers for... It must have been more than ten years now, mustn't it? Ever since the Blight ended, more or less. With everything going on in the Hinterlands, though, we've had to leave that behind. We're hoping the mage camp will take us, since we might attract some unwelcome attention in Redcliffe proper. We worked in the castle for a bit after fleeing the Circle, you see, but then ran from there too to avoid getting caught up in the feud between the arl and the queen's regent."

"I probably would have just followed Loghain's orders if Lily hadn't been there to talk sense into me," Levin said. "He had the higher rank, so shouldn't that be the right thing to do?" He shook his head. "For all its talk of scholarship and education, growing up in the Circle sure does make you stupid in some very specific ways."

"All right, but what about my mother?" Suzandra asked. "Solona _did_ have a daughter who'd be my age now, didn't she? Isn't that why you were staring?"

"She did," Levin confirmed. "What about her, though? Where do I start? Solona was my best friend. When I was having trouble with my studies, she'd help me. When I was anxious about something, she'd play word games with me to distract me. It always seemed a bit strange to me at the time. She was a favorite of the First Enchanter, so I could only drag her down. It was probably mostly an accident of timing that she got attached, but I think that it also helped her feel strong to be able to play protector for another apprentice, especially since I was older and all. And I did make her laugh, I suppose, though usually I wasn't trying to." He rubbed at his face, though Dinah could not see anything on it. "Oh, and she's the one who helped me escape. There's that, too."

"They were going to make him Tranquil on false pretenses," Lily said. "We couldn't stick around for that."

"You don't have to justify it to me," Suzandra told her, sounding annoyed. "Why didn't you take her with you, though?"

"She helped us smash my phylactery, but hers had already been moved elsewhere," Levin explained.

"I still get the shivers every time I think of that awful room in the basement," Lily complained. "All those vials of magicked blood. And they had the nerve to call _him_ a maleficar for glancing through the wrong book!" Levin touched her shoulder as she had done to him earlier.

"Hold on," said Suzandra. "If she helped you leave, doesn't that mean she was still alive when you left? Do you know what happened to her? Did she get caught up in the mess with the demons during the Blight? Or was she at the Battle of Denerim? Or..." Suzandra took a deep breath before continuing, "Is there a chance that she could still be..?"

"Maker's..." Levin cut the oath off halfway. He and Lily turned to each other for a moment before turning back to Suzandra. "I'm sorry. I should have asked what you already knew. Since you'd figured out about being an Amell and all, I guess I just assumed you'd heard the gist of it at least."

"Heard of the gist of what?" Suzandra asked, taking Dinah's hand in her own and squeezing it almost but not quite enough to hurt.

"They almost caught us on our way out," Levin said. "Solona... sacrificed herself to let us escape."

"Your mother was a skilled mage and a good person," Lily said. "And yet, she became an abomination because the Circle pushed her to it. I haven't ever forgotten that, and you shouldn't either."

"What's that mean?" Suzandra asked, releasing Dinah's hand to grasp even more tightly at the fabric of her cloak. "It just goes to show how magic is always dangerous no matter who's using it, or something?"

"No," said Lily, "it goes to show that the Circles are unholy. The Chantry actively helps demons tempt mages so that it can punish the ones who succumb. That's what nearly happened to Levin. It's what happens routinely at Harrowings. With Solona, it was less direct, perhaps less intentional, but still a clear enough illustration for anyone who cares to really _look_. I didn't used to care. I thought what was happening to Levin was a simple miscarriage of justice. But it wasn't. The Templars and the well-behaved Enchanters believe that _is_ justice."

"Huh," said Suzandra. "That's... not what I expected to hear."

"I thought you might not have heard it before," said Lily. "That's the only reason I'm saying it. I'm not your moral instructor, and I get the impression you wouldn't want me to be." Even having said that, she continued on in a tone that Dinah had seldom heard outside of a chapel, "The countryfolk and villagers around here all take a dim view of the rebellion, and I certainly don't blame them for that, considering the impact it's had on their lives. But putting things back the way they were can only lead to these tragedies repeating in the future. The only real solution is for the whole system to be broken down to its foundations and rebuilt from the ground up. In that sense, the rebels are doing the Maker's work. I can only pray that the horrible cost of their efforts will not be in vain. I will also pray that you, Suzandra, will benefit from this chance to learn from the world beyond the Circle's walls, and that the Maker will guide you safely through these turbulent times."

"No thanks," said Suzandra. "If anything anyone says about the Maker is true, one or two people praying isn't going to convince him to intervene for me, so you should probably save your breath."

Lily stared in silence for a moment before saying, "Well, you are certainly learning to think and speak for yourself, at least."

"Solona used to say those sorts of things too," Levin said with a small smile. "Not to the clergy or anyone else with authority, of course, but to me. Sometimes it made me nervous, but she was always careful not to be overheard, and she sounded like she might have burst if she couldn't point out all the inconsistencies she saw in Chantry doctrine to _someone_."

"I'm glad she had you to listen to her," said Suzandra, smiling back at him. Her hands appeared to have relaxed somewhat. She still kneaded at her clothes, but now with considerably less aggression. "I know this is an awkward thing to ask with your wife here and all, but is there any chance that you could be my father?"

The expression on Levin's face made the answer to that clear before he said anything. "What? No, no, absolutely not. I always saw her as a sister, which was just as well since it turned out she wasn't really interested in men in that-"

"Levin," Lily interrupted.

"What?" said Levin. "She asked."

"I'm twelve, not five," said Suzandra. "I know what an invert is."

Lily looked increasingly displeased. "That's not really a nice word to call someone, especially your mother."

"Really?" asked Suzandra. "No one I know minds it. Maybe it's different out here. What's the polite word?"

"There isn't _a_ polite word," said Levin, rolling his eyes. In a nasally falsetto, he continued, "Oh, she's the sort who prefers the company of other women, if you catch my drift."

Lily buried her face in her hands, but said nothing.

Suzandra stopped smiling and said, "So that's it. She really is dead."

Levin also stopped smiling. "I'm sorry," he said.

"This happened in Kinloch Hold before the Blight and the demons and all, right?" Suzandra asked. "So even if you had any way of guessing who killed her, odds are decent they're already dead too."

"I wish," said Levin. "No, I don't know who took the demon down, but I know who killed her, and I know that he's still alive, because the Chantry is out there calling him a hero for pacifying Kirkwall or some... rubbish."

"Who?" Suzandra asked.

"Cullen Rutherford," said Levin. "If it weren't for everything he put her through, I don't think she would have gone that far even for my sake." His frown deepened. "Or maybe I'm just fooling myself. Maybe it's my fault for leaning on her when she couldn't take it. Maybe you've got your culprit right here."

"Levin..." Lily lifted her head from her hands and looked to him with concern. "There was no singular culprit. Didn't we agree on that? Whatever mistakes we might have made, there's no sense blaming ourselves when you'd both been set up to fail from the start."

"Right, right," said Levin. "I don't blame you, so I can't blame myself either. Easier reasoned than felt, though."

"I don't think it was your fault either," Suzandra said. "You're too nice. Thank you for answering all my questions. Most people... don't really do that so easily. I guess I've probably kept you long enough, and I should let you go do your thing with talking to whoever." Then they said their goodbyes, somewhat awkwardly shaking hands while expressing both gratitude for their chance meeting and a desire to meet again soon, and Suzandra pointed Lily and Levin in the general direction of Fiona's quarters.

"There are still questions to be answered about Susanne and Daylen," Dinah pointed out once they were gone.

"Huh?" said Suzandra. "Do you think they would know about them too?"

"I meant in general," said Dinah. "Your quest is not yet complete."

"Of course it's not," said Suzandra. "You're still Tranquil, for one thing."

"Is the cure still one of your objectives?" Dinah asked. "I have not heard you asking about it."

"Yeah, well, with how everyone reacted to me asking about things even normal people would want to know, I'm not really sure how to go about that one. But that doesn't mean I've given up. I'm sure I'll think of something eventually."

"I think that giving yourself time is a good idea," said Dinah.

"You do?" Suzandra asked.

"Yes," said Dinah.

Suzandra stared as though she were about to ask another question, but then did not. "Anyway," she said instead, "There's something else I want to look into now, too."

"What is that?" Dinah asked.

"Cullen Rutherford," Suzandra said. Dinah waited for her to elaborate, but she did not.

—

More months passed. Suzandra spoke to Levin and Lily repeatedly, but learned nothing else of importance about her quest. For some reason, she did not bring up Cullen Rutherford to them at all.

Meanwhile, from what Dinah heard, Templars continued to stalk the Hinterlands. Some mages complained that they felt less like they were being sheltered and more like they were being corralled for slaughter. They complained that the Redcliffe camp was on its way to becoming just another Circle. Some of them left.

When the rumors began of magic-wielding bandits attacking travelers in the countryside, some of the Redcliffe mages said that it was probably the complainers who had left, and some said that it was mercenary apostates from somewhere foreign, and some said it might be both of those joined up together. A former Enchanter complained about the apostates giving all mages a bad name, and her former apprentice yelled at her, "You mean the bandits! They're bandits! We're _all_ apostates, so if apostates are bad then we're all bad and we're all doomed!"

The Chantry announced that a conclave would be held in Haven, where the Divine would preside over negotiations between the renegade Templars and the rebel mages. From what Dinah could tell, though, the Redcliffe mages who went to the conclave in hopes that it would go well were not the ones who considered themselves rebels. The few self-professed rebel mages who went did so because they were certain it would go poorly.

In the end, it went more poorly than anyone had predicted.

Soon after that, there was talk at the camp of a second Inquisition. There was talk of a Herald of Andraste. People said that the Herald was a mage. They said that she might help them, which sounded to Dinah like the opposite of an Inquisition, from what little she could remember learning about the historical one.

Levin and Lily apparently shared her skepticism on that front, because those were the rumors that convinced them to leave Redcliffe. While Lily was saying her goodbyes to Suzandra, Levin took Dinah aside.

"Right, so," he said, looking at his feet, "Lily and I talked it over, whether we should bring Suzandra with us, and decided that it's probably best not to. Who knows what kind of trouble we'll be getting ourselves into next, yeah? Given my record, the Inquisition will be the frying pan, and whatever's out there will be the fire. But..." He looked up at Dinah's shoulder. He looked up further, at her ear. He glanced over her face, stared at her forehead for a silent minute or two, and then looked back at her ear.

"Rutherford's their military commander," he continued at last. "Whoever they're claiming as their figurehead, that says far more. Or maybe it doesn't, but I'm still not going near him. Suzandra shouldn't either. She shouldn't ever have to know anything about him. But if they end up meeting, then she will have to know. That's why I need you to help me. If I tell you everything, it won't affect you at all, but you can pass it along to her if she ever starts to think for a second that she can trust him. And believe me, I know there are many, _many_ reasons why this is a terrible idea that will probably end up hurting her, but that's true of every idea I can think of, including just doing nothing. So..." He trailed off, and did not speak again until he succeeded at looking Dinah in the eye. "If I tell you what I know, would it be possible for you to listen and remember, but then just not think about it unless he approaches her?"

"Yes, that should be possible," said Dinah.

"Thank you," said Levin. Then he told his story, and Dinah listened and remembered and did her best not to think.

—

There was no talk of the Venatori. One day, they were just there.

More than once during their occupation, a stranger approached Dinah and demanded that she follow them somewhere alone to aid in some unspecified task. They seemed surprised when Dinah refused. They seemed even more surprised when Suzandra latched onto her and threatened to scream.

"Forget it," someone said after one such confrontation. "Leaving some is probably best for avoiding trouble anyhow." From that point on, they did not approach her again.

The Inquisition arrived just as suddenly as the Venatori had, and the Venatori left the same way. Then the mages left too, for Haven. Dinah did not understand why and did not learn until later that the king had revoked his protection, but Suzandra went with them, and Dinah went with Suzandra. The two had to work together to carry Suzandra's by that time quite extensive collection of rocks and other debris she had found by the lake.

They did not stay long in Haven, because it was attacked by Templars. Or, at least, it was attacked, and Dinah saw Templars for a moment before she and Suzandra were hastened away to an evacuation tunnel. She later heard that it had been attacked by Corypheus. She heard that Corypheus was a Darkspawn, that he was a Magister, that he was the Inquisition's nemesis. She heard that he commanded the Templars, that he commanded an army of mages from Tevinter, that he commanded a troop of Grey Wardens, that he commanded a dragon that might or might not be an archdemon. She decided to stop trying to make sense of what she heard, and focused on the physical task of marching through the snow.

"I am sorry that we could not bring your rocks this time," Dinah told Suzandra when they settled into camp that night.

"Rocks are stupid," Suzandra said through chattering teeth as she huddled against Dinah. "Snow is stupid," she added. "And singing is extra stupid. I just want to sleep. Does being a good Andrastian suddenly mean not sleeping?"

"If they are holding vigil, then I suppose it does," said Dinah. The music did not bother her. It was not an unpleasant sound, nor was it distinct enough from the general clamor of camp to be distracting. She wondered why it affected Suzandra so differently.

"I think they've just gone mad," said Suzandra. "Is this what you call a cult? I think it must be a cult."

"Perhaps," said Dinah. "Though with the Chantry hierarchy in such disarray, I do not know who would have the authority to determine what is orthodox Andrastianism and what is a cult."

Suzandra groaned. "Never mind. I just remembered that orthodox Andrastianism is really stupid too, so I don't actually care. Maybe they'll take over another cathedral! At least then we'd have a roof over our heads."

As events unfolded, the Inquisition did not take over another cathedral. Instead, it discovered and occupied an abandoned fortress in the Frostback Mountains. The Redcliffe mages got a tower of it all to themselves, more or less, and the "less" was not Templar guards but rather Inquisition mages who wanted either to live among others of their own kind or else _not_ to live among the sort of people who made up the bulk of the Inquisition's forces. Dinah overheard some bitter jokes about this arrangement, but overall most of the mages seemed to be more satisfied with it than they had been with the accommodations in Haven, let alone back in the Circle.

There were windows in the tower, and the spaces in front of them were usually occupied by one or more mages standing around staring out from them, even though anyone who wanted to take in a bit of fresh air by simply walking out the door was free to do so. Suzandra did both of those things quite frequently.

"Enjoying the view?" Dinah asked once. At the time, Suzandra was hanging half out one of the uppermost windows when Dinah approached her, and so Dinah wanted to make certain Suzandra would hear her coming and not be startled.

"Not really," said Suzandra. "Sometimes I don't know why I even bother. When there's one man in heavy armor wandering around the courtyard, there's at least a dozen of them. Like swarms of beetles, but instead of being creepy and sort of cute all at once, they're just creepy." She stretched out a hand with the fingers curled in against the palm and the thumb raised, and mimed squashing the distant soldiers one by one. "I'm looking for the Commander, so his armor's a bit more... Commander-y, but I can barely make that out at this distance, let alone faces, let alone anything I don't already know on the rare occasion I do manage to spot him. Wouldn't it be great if I could somehow get closer to him without that meaning he'd also be closer to me?"

"I do not think that you should approach him," Dinah said.

"I won't. That's what I was just saying. Levin and Lily knew who I was right away, and so did your old friends back at Jainen. I can't know if he would without knowing what kind of Templar he is, and I can't know what kind of _anything_ he is without either getting closer to him or asking around, and if I ask around everyone is going to know _exactly_ what I'm up to, after I went and gave myself a reputation. It's really, _really_ frustrating!"

"What are you up to?" Dinah tried asking.

"Probably nothing I should say out loud, especially since I'm not certain yet," Suzandra said.

Dinah thought that she could understand that sentiment to a degree that bordered on empathetic, even if she could not begin to grasp Suzandra's frustration with it. She found herself growing increasingly uncertain these days, not quite directionless but rather stalled at a fork between two directions. She intended to support Suzandra, and Suzandra wanted information that Dinah could perhaps give to her, but Suzandra would not say enough for Dinah to determine whether the information she had to offer would be helpful or harmful, and she defaulted to taking no action.

Why _did_ she default to taking no action? She certainly did not believe that that was always the safest choice. In spite of Levin's misgivings, even in spite of Dinah's own uncertainty, passing his knowledge on to her had likely been a better thing for Suzandra than staying silent and taking it with him when he left.

Then again, Levin _had_ been leaving. For him, staying silent might have been an irreversible decision. For Dinah, the opposite was true. She could afford a bit of inertia, because she intended to stay by Suzandra's side for the foreseeable future.

Though, if she intended to continue supporting Suzandra, and supporting her included staying by her side, which she could and would do for the foreseeable future, and the future became less foreseeable when Dinah considered factors like how Suzandra would react to new information or to achieving certain objectives of her quest...

Perhaps she should find someone to ask, as Suzandra was always doing, and delegate out the decision to someone in a better position to make it, as Levin had done. Perhaps she should start paying the sort of attention to the mages around her that might allow her to determine who might make a decent confidant. Dinah decided she would begin with that just as soon as this headache subsided.

"I would like to visit the medicinal garden," she told Suzandra. "Would you like that also?"

"Huh?" When Suzandra pulled her upper body back in from the window, she looked confused. She glanced around as though checking to see whether anyone else was nearby. No one was, and so Dinah thought that perhaps when Suzandra spoke again, she would say the sort of thing that should not be overheard. Instead, she just smiled a seemingly genuine, excited smile and said, "Sure, let's do that!"


	3. Chapter 3

Dinah's head felt better after a stroll through the garden to take in the embrium, but she never did get the opportunity to enact her plan. As she and Suzandra were returning to the tower, they were approached by a woman Dinah had never seen before.

"There you are!" the woman said. "You must be the Amells. Dinah and Suzandra, right? I've been keeping an eye out for you. Fiona mentioned you were here, and then the boy told me I should definitely go help you before something bad happened."

When Suzandra's only response was a silent, wide-eyed stare, Dinah tried asking, "What boy?"

"Excellent question!" said the woman. "What was his name again? Started with a C. Compassion? Must have been, though I think he had another one too. Anyway, the important part is, I understand you're looking for two things, and I can help with both. As far as family goes... Well, I'm your cousin. Nice to meet you!"

"Hawke?" Suzandra asked finally. "Are you really Hawke? Champion of Kirkwall? Mother of the rebellion? And you're just... talking to me? Talking to _us_?"

"I keep trying to tell people I'm more like a midwife than a mother," said Hawke.

"What are you even doing here?" asked Suzandra.

"An ever-growing list of things, it would seem," said Hawke. "That's usually how it goes. But right at this moment, I'm introducing myself to some long-lost family of mine. Hello!"

"Hello," said Dinah.

Hawke looked at her directly and smiled. "I'm glad you made it. Another thing I'm doing is trying to find any Tranquil mages who might be interested in... ah... a change of residence, along with possible other changes. Unfortunately, there don't appear to be many of you left after Redcliffe, and the ones I've met so far are all so... heavily employed... that it would be difficult to extract them without drawing unwanted attention."

"Oh wow," said Suzandra. " _That's_ the second thing you can help us with? Really?"

"It sure is!" said Hawke. "Perhaps we could discuss it somewhere a group of Templars — sorry, _ex_ -Templars — is less likely to walk by?"

"We were just heading back to our quarters," Suzandra said. "Come on and join us!" She reached out toward Hawke as though to grab her hand, but then froze with her arms only partway extended. "Er, I mean, if that's not too far away, and you aren't too busy, because you're _Hawke,_ and I'm sure you have a bunch of stuff to take care of. I mean, _obviously_ you have a bunch of stuff to take care of, because you just told me that you do, so it's not like I think I'm smart for thinking of that, but I just mean that I don't want to, er, _monopolize_ your time or—"

Hawke interrupted with a short burst of laughter. Suzandra tensed even more, but then Hawke just held out her hand and said, "Lead the way!" and Suzandra smiled as she took hold of it and did just that.

"Are you all right?" Dinah asked Suzandra as she followed after them. "You are not usually so timid."

"I'm fine!" Suzandra insisted. "Totally and completely fine! Please, please don't start talking about what I'm usually like right now!"

Dinah and Suzandra shared a bedroom with a few other mages, but luckily it happened to be unoccupied when they and Hawke arrived. Suzandra closed the door behind them and asked just as it clicked shut, "What do you know about the cure for Tranquility?"

"What _don't_ I know about it?" Hawke responded. "I can't do it here and now, if that's your next question, but I've got a base of sorts about a day's journey from Skyhold that would work, if you're up for the trip."

"How dangerous is it?" Dinah asked.

"Not terribly, if you've got people who know what they're doing to help you through it," Hawke said. "There's spirit stuff involved, which obviously is never entirely without risk. One bit of good news is that there's no need for full-on possession, though that is a quick and dirty option."

"I was not only asking about the process itself," Dinah elaborated. "You seem to be implying that you have done this before. What generally becomes of the mages afterward? I cannot imagine they simply return to how they were before Tranquility."

"Well, no," Hawke said. "Time changes people, obviously, as do the sort of experiences that Tranquil mages tend to have in that time."

"Oh," Suzandra said quietly, and it occurred to Dinah that she might not have realized that before.

"But," Hawke continued, "so far we've always been able to get them somewhere safe. Besides, you don't have to rely on past examples. We can temporarily connect you to a small part of the Fade to give you a preview before you commit to anything permanent."

"Wait, seriously?" Suzandra asked. "That's great!" She turned to Dinah. "So there's no downside at all to just trying it, right?"

"Perhaps not," Dinah lied.

"So... yeah, let's do that!" Suzandra said to Hawke. "I'm sure you're way too busy to head out right now, but whenever you're ready, just let us know, and we'll join you!"

"We?" Dinah asked. "Do you intend to come too?"

"Yeah, obviously!" said Suzandra. "Why wouldn't I?"

"You do realize," Dinah said, "that if I regain my emotions, I will lose many of the qualities that make me useful to you."

"I don't need you to be useful," Suzandra insisted. "I don't want a servant. I just want my aunt!"

Suzandra appeared to be growing upset, but Dinah did not think it would be helpful in the long run to simply let the matter drop. "I will likely become very unpleasant company, and possibly outright dangerous," she tried to explain.

"So what?" Suzandra asked. " _I'm_ unpleasant and supposedly dangerous too! No matter what you're like, I'd rather be with you than all alone. Especially if you'll be with _Hawke_!"

"You're clearly not as impressed with me as she is, and I can't say I blame you for that," Hawke said to Dinah. "But please at least believe that I won't let things go so wrong that you turn into an abomination and kill everyone in the area. No guarantees about pleasantness, though."

Unpleasantness might itself be dangerous, but as Dinah struggled to decide whether and how to say that, Suzandra cut in, "Before we waste more time arguing about something I'm not going to change my mind about and run out of time to talk about other things, I wanted to ask... Hawke, you found us. Have you found anything about Dinah's brother and sisters? We've already heard that Solona and Emilia are deceased, but the other two... I mean, Dinah thinks that Suzann went to the Gallows, so I know what the odds are there, but you were _at_ the Gallows, so maybe you have something more than the odds?"

"When I got the chance to ask the First Enchanter, he told me she failed her Harrowing," Hawke said. "She was gone before I ever arrived in Kirkwall."

"Oh," said Suzandra. "Figures."

"I heard about Solona and Emilia too," Hawke continued. "I don't know anything about Daylen, beyond that he was taken from his father by Templars just like his sisters were. It's possible he kept his head down well enough that most of the other mages at his Circle failed to remember his name, or even that he changed his name before introducing himself to them. But it's also possible he never made it to the Circle at all. Maybe he was under enough stress to listen to demons. Even if he wasn't, some Templars are less forgiving than others of struggling or talking back." She grimaced. "And some of them are just lazy. If the nearest Circle not already occupied by one of his sisters was all the way across the Waking Sea..."

"I hate them," said Suzandra.

"What a coincidence," said Hawke. "I do too! I'm so glad we're both bad mages. It must run in the family." Suzandra managed to smile a little at that.

"You mentioned my father," said Dinah. "Your side of the family has heard from him?"

"Not since before we left Ferelden, no," said Hawke. "And I don't know where your mother disappeared to either."

"So that's everyone," said Suzandra. "Everyone's either dead, or else vanished off the face of the planet and probably also dead."

"Not everyone," said Hawke. "You two are still here."

Dinah thought that might not be the best form of consolation. "The Amells are not everyone anyhow," she told Suzandra. "You never met my parents or siblings. Your emotional investment in them was a choice, and you can choose to make other investments. You get along well enough with some of the other children here, when you put in the effort. There is nothing stopping you from making friends. If all goes well, there may be nothing stopping you from making your own family someday."

"That isn't how feelings work," Suzandra said. "Yeah, I started looking in the first place because I thought it could help me not be scared. But I've been at it for a really, really long time now! And I know it was really stupid of me, because if I hadn't done that, I probably would have been fine by now, but as it is..." She stared off into the distance for a moment, but before Dinah could come up with anything else to say, she jolted back to attention and turned to face Hawke. "Right, I had just one other question! Do you still not mind talking to me?"

"Lay it on me," said Hawke.

"Thank you!" said Suzandra. "Sorry, it's kind of a weird one, but... You were in Kirkwall at the same time as Commander Rutherford, right? Did you ever run into him?"

"Unfortunately," said Hawke.

"Okay, well, that probably already mostly answers it, but what kind of person was he?"

"The _worst_ kind of person," said Hawke, and then sighed. "No, that's not true. He isn't technically _the_ worst. That's part of what makes him so frustrating. He was Meredith Stannard's right-hand man, which ought to tell you most of what you need to know about him. But it also means he was always in proximity to Meredith Stannard, and it's impossible not to benefit from _that_ comparison. Does that make sense? Even just thinking about him annoys me so much that I worry I might be ranting incoherently."

"No, I think I get it," Suzandra assured her. "But I would like to hear some actual details. I mean, if you don't mind."

"Suzandra should not go near him," Dinah told Hawke.

"I don't plan to," said Suzandra. "Are you all right today?" she asked Dinah. "You keep saying really weird things."

"I am fine, thank you." said Dinah. "Today is no different than any other day in that regard." How could it be? If anything, it was Suzandra's unusual behavior that might be a cause for concern.

Hawke looked back and forth between the two of them for a moment, then said, "Well, I've never been much good at keeping my mouth shut, so why start now? Your aunt is right, Suzandra. Rutherford is someone any mage who values whatever might be left of her sanity should strive to avoid. He is completely secure in his horrible view of the world, to the point that he responds to being contradicted by asking how you could say such things. It sounds like a question he genuinely does not know the answer to, but he also doesn't bother listening if you try to answer it."

"Then he is the dogmatic type," Dinah surmised. "One of the true believers." That did not entirely line up with what she had heard of him from Levin, but perhaps he had undergone some form of religious rebirth.

"In a sense," said Hawke. "Though I think he mostly just believes whatever benefits him most. For example, I never bothered pretending I had any respect for him, but when he was trying and failing to kill every mage in the Gallows down to the last child, he refused to attack me directly and started acting like we were friends when I confronted him. Clearly he saw which way the wind was blowing and didn't want to die. Then again, part of it may also have been that he'd gotten too used to thinking of me as an actual person rather than a mage for him to believe I meant what I said about revolution, even when I was in the midst of enacting it."

"So then," said Suzandra, "what do you think it means that he's following Lady Trevelyan now?"

"It means that we should all feel very bad for Lady Trevelyan," said Hawke. "Apparently he insists he has no problem with taking orders from a mage, but then throws a tantrum and makes thinly veiled threats of insubordination when those orders involve treating _other_ mages like people. When that fails to get him his way, he acts like it never happened." She went silent for a beat. "Oh dear. Spilling details about the Inquisition leadership's internal conflicts because a cute little kid asked nicely is probably too much reckless rule-bending even for me."

"I'm not a _little_ kid," Suzandra objected. "I'm already twelve! That's getting up there, as far as kids go."

"True," Hawke said. She smiled for the first time since the topic of Ser Rutherford had come up. "Maybe you're mature enough that I can count on you to never breathe a word of what I just told you to anyone else."

"Of course you can!" said Suzandra, sounding determined to prove that. It occurred to Dinah that this Hawke woman had very quickly gotten quite good at understanding her.

"Suzandra," Dinah said, "if that was your last question, and if both you and Hawke are amenable to it, I would like a chance to speak with her alone for a while. I have a few more questions of my own."

Suzandra turned to her with a start. "Questions that you can't ask in front of me?"

"Questions that I would prefer not to ask in front of you," Dinah clarified.

Suzandra frowned deeply. "Why? What did I do wrong?"

"I doubt you did anything wrong," said Hawke, "but if Dinah asking for something like that is so unusual, don't you think that's a good reason to take her request seriously?"

"It occurs to me," Dinah added, "that this is your room, and I should not force you to leave it if you do not wish to. I could go elsewhere if you prefer, or even put the matter off until later."

"But it's your room too," Suzandra said. "So that means I shouldn't force you to leave either, right? If you need me to leave you alone here for a few minutes, I guess I should just do that. And I will do it! I'm a good person! See?" Before she had finished speaking, Suzandra had crossed the room and was halfway out the door. "Nice to meet you, Hawke! Thank you for everything! I'll talk to you later!" Then she closed the door behind her and disappeared.

"Poor kid," said Hawke. "I may have said too much there. Not _everything_ runs in families."

"Her strange behavior began before you had said much more than, 'I'm your cousin. Nice to meet you,'" Dinah pointed out.

"Did it? Well, you know her better than I do." Hawke took an extra step toward Dinah and lowered her voice. "On that note, what odds would you give she's waiting just outside and trying to listen in?"

"It is possible," said Dinah, also dropping her voice to just above a whisper. "She has mentioned that she used to eavesdrop back in the Circle, but ever since we left, she has seemed to prefer much more direct methods. In any case, I did not ask her to leave just because what I have to say might upset her. The bigger issue is that I do not want her to interrupt me if I say something with which she disagrees. Everything is happening very suddenly, and I am having difficulty putting my thoughts about it into words even without having to also consider her immediate response."

"Makes sense to me," said Hawke. "Take your time."

"Thank you," said Dinah. "I will start by saying that emotions can be dangerous even without the intervention of demons. They can be painful enough to kill. I appreciate that you are offering me an opportunity to find out whether having mine returned to me feels survivable, and I would like to trust that you will not pressure me to go ahead with the full ritual if I decide that it does not. However, my life is not the only one to consider."

"What an ominous place for a pause!" Hawke said.

"I am taking my time," Dinah reminded her.

"I know, I know," Hawke said. "Don't mind me. I'm just ridiculous."

"I do not mind you," Dinah assured her. "In fact, I cannot. That is not unrelated to what I am trying to explain. I believe that Suzandra is hoping to get two things from curing my Tranquility: a sense of having achieved something, and an aunt who can love her properly. With regard to the first, I suspect she will be disappointed if I fail to be happy enough for her to consider it a straightforward victory. With regard to the second, I suspect she will be disappointed for even more complicated reasons."

"I'm having trouble believing that," said Hawke. "Even like this, you clearly care about her a lot, in your own way. Do you really think that's going to disappear just because you regain the capacity to get annoyed with her?"

"I do not," Dinah clarified. "However, I also do not think the mere fact of my caring about her will prevent her from being hurt when I inevitably lose patience with her. And I do not think that I will be able to balance those feelings well enough to avoid making her feel unwanted, even if I do in fact continue to want her around."

"Just so I'm clear, are you saying you expect you'll continue to want that or not?"

"I expect that I will, to some extent at least, but not as straightforwardly as I currently do. My initial decision to travel with Suzandra was made almost at random, but it has worked out well enough. Since I made it, I have found no reason to deviate from it. She has been consistently thoughtful and helpful to me. Even as helpless as we both are, we have so far managed to keep each other safe. However, I have not failed to notice certain other qualities of hers. She is temperamental, demanding, stubborn, and frequently sullen."

"Sounds like normal kid stuff to me," said Hawke.

"Perhaps it is," Dinah conceded. "I have spent much less time around normal kids than I have around apprentices."

"I'm starting to see what you mean about the possibility you'll hurt her."

"Perhaps you are," said Dinah, "but I do not think I am making my point well at all. I do not mean to say that there is anything wrong with Suzandra. The issue is that there will be many things wrong with me. They will be the opposite of the things that are currently wrong with me, and my current state is what has allowed me to be there for her in a way that no one else has. She is the sort of child that Enchanters would call difficult, and yet I have never found her difficult at all."

"So for her sake, you have some reservations about going through with the cure," Hawke summed up. "But what about if you don't go through with it, for her sake? Don't you think there's a chance she might feel just a tiny bit devastatingly guilty about that?"

"Yes, I am aware that there are problems with every possible course of action or inaction," said Dinah. "That is what I need your help sorting out. And what you have just brought up is not the only problem with inaction. If I refuse the cure, I will be rendering meaningless one of Suzandra's long-term goals, and she does not have many of those left. I do not want to cause her to find herself with nothing left."

"All right, hold up," said Hawke. "I know I told you to take your time, but if the bush you've been beating around here is that the twelve-year-old may be a suicide risk, I'm going to need you to just come out and say that right now."

"I have not been beating around any bushes," Dinah protested. "I thought that much was obvious, and have been attempting to provide relevant details."

"Wonderful," said Hawke. "You know, I suddenly have this sinking feeling that sending her away unsupervised might not have been the greatest idea."

Before Dinah could respond, there was a loud rap on the door, providing only a moment's warning before it was thrown open. "Soldiers gathered just outside the first floor entrance," exclaimed a girl clinging to the door handle and leaning partway into the room as she gasped for breath. "Rutherford is there, but the Inquisitor is arguing with him. Don't know if there's anything at the other exits, so making a run for it might or might not be the best plan. I'm just spreading the word. Take care!" Then she straightened herself up and bolted out of sight.

"Oh, look!" said Hawke. "It's my favorite thing: more problems!" She hurried out of the room, and Dinah followed. When Dinah did not see any sign of Suzandra in the hall, she continued following Hawke to the stairway and down to the ground floor.

Downstairs, many mages were gathered around just inside the door to the courtyard, and many soldiers were gathered around just outside of it. Dinah still did not see Suzandra. Everyone she did see appeared to be focused on Lady Trevelyan and Commander Rutherford, who stood in the doorway facing each other, so Dinah decided to focus on them as well.

"I know you think I'm soft on mages because I don't agree that we should be punished just for existing," Lady Trevelyan was saying, "but this is an actual problem, and you can trust me to take it seriously."

"If you really meant that, you would be facing the other direction," Commander Rutherford responded.

"You're the one making that impossible! If I turn my back on you and let you go charging in there, everything is just going to get worse and more chaotic."

"Subduing chaos is my purview, _not_ Leliana's. She generally does the opposite, in fact. While you're stalling for her arrival, the culprits could be escaping into the larger fortress from the upper levels. I always knew this tower wasn't secure enough to put mages in!"

"It isn't supposed to be—" Trevelyan cut herself off with a sigh. "The point is, Leliana's purview is _investigation_. We need to investigate, not run around blindly cracking heads."

"I am not acting blindly! Someone shot lightning at me! Such an unsubtle crime does not require a particularly subtle investigation!"

"Someone shot lightning at you _and missed_ , which is not easy to do. The way lightning works, it more or less starts at the target and moves backward."

"While it is in some ways a relief to know that the mage who tried to kill me is incompetent, it would nonetheless be a mistake to relax before they are apprehended."

"What I'm saying is, they might not have been trying to kill you at all. It's possible we've been infiltrated by someone trying to stir up internal conflict."

"Why would that suggest an infiltration? The rebels' favorite tactic is breaking arrangements they no longer wish to honor with provocative acts of violence. This is entirely typical of the mages you decided to ally us with!"

"No, no, no," said Hawke, stepping forward to Trevelyan's side. "When rebel mages provocate, we still do our best to take out the target. We're very practical that way! If this were about breaking with the Inquisition, you would be too well-cooked to do anything about it."

Rutherford's expression shifted. He still appeared displeased, but a different kind of displeased. "Hello, Hawke. Dare I ask what you're doing here?"

"Well," said Hawke, "this is a mage tower, and I am a mage, so it seems like a fairly suitable place for me to be. Though maybe you would argue that it isn't so suitable because it's not secure enough."

"I don't have time for your nonsense right now," said Rutherford. "Did you have anything to do with this mess or not?"

"That is a very, _very_ good question," said Hawke. "I'm impressed! You aren't generally someone I can expect to ask the right questions."

"Is this a joke?" Trevelyan asked. "I thought you approved of what we're trying to do here. Why would you put the balance at risk now?"

"That's not a bad question either," said Hawke. "Well inquisited, Inquisitor! Now I also have a question: where is Varric?"

"That means she's lying and she wants help doing it better," Rutherford told Trevelyan.

"Pardon you!" said Hawke. "I am not lying. I am merely choosing my words carefully, as one does in such delicate situations."

It occurred to Dinah that while Hawke had not made any false statements, that was because she had not made many direct statements of any kind. Dinah knew perfectly well that Hawke could not have shot lightning at anyone any time recently, because she had been with her since returning to the tower, yet Hawke seemed to be implying otherwise. Dinah wondered what exactly she was up to. Presumably she was trying to accomplish the same thing as Trevelyan — preventing Rutherford and his men from storming the tower — but Trevelyan did not sound particularly pleased with her.

"Hawke didn't do anything wrong! No one did anything wrong but me!" Dinah recognized Suzandra's voice as the girl came rushing in from behind her, but did not think quickly enough to react before she had passed her by. Hawke did react, though. She grabbed Suzandra by the wrists before she could make it out the door, pulled her into shelter behind the Inquisitor's back, and held her close in spite of her struggling.

"All right." Trevelyan took a deep breath, then turned sideways so that she could keep an eye on both Suzandra and Rutherford. "Everything is going to be all right. I promise I'll take care of it. Could you please explain, as calmly as possible, exactly what you did and why?"

"I shot lightning at Commander Rutherford from a second-story window, because it's my destiny to kill him!" Suzandra explained, not at all calmly.

"I can think of many perfectly rational reasons that someone might want to kill the Knight-Captain of the Gallows," Hawke told her, "but destiny is not one of them."

"I'm right here," said Rutherford.

"Oh, I'm sorry," said Hawke. "You must be used to people caring."

"It's your fault my mother is dead!" Suzandra shouted at Rutherford. "It's your fault that all of this happened to me! Literally _all_ of it!"

"There is something very wrong with that apprentice," Rutherford said. He drew his sword, and the soldiers behind him followed suit. "Step away from her, Inquisitor. She is dangerous."

Trevelyan only moved to face him fully, turning her back on Suzandra. "Threatening her isn't going to make her _less_ dangerous," she said.

"This is no threat. She has already confessed. What more do you need before you'll take action?"

"Just let me go!" Suzandra sobbed into Hawke's chest. "You're dead the moment they think you even might do something bad, and I actually did something, so of course I'm dead! I knew that, and I decided to be stupid anyway! Just let me go and let it be quick!"

"If an arrow struck the ground at your feet and then a small child claimed to have been the one who fired it, would you cut her down on the spot?" Trevelyan asked Rutherford.

"Of course not," said Rutherford. "I would start by confiscating the bow and finding out who had given it to her in the first place. But a mage is her own weapon, and it's no great mystery who put her up to this — or _what_ put her up to it, rather."

"Not everything mages do is about demons, Commander," Trevelyan said.

"Perhaps not, but I won't allow you to risk your life and mine on the off-chance that this one is different!"

"It isn't your place to allow me or not!" Trevelyan snapped at him.

"Forgive me, but for the sake of the Inquisition and everything it stands for—"

"What exactly do you think it stands for?" Trevelyan interrupted him. "I thought I had been as clear about this as I possibly could be, but I don't have the type of faith you seem to want me to have! So don't try to convince me that the world can never be any kinder than it has been so far — to mages and to _everyone_ — because you will _not_ like what happens if you ever succeed!"

Dinah suddenly felt a presence at her back, and a voice that she did not recognize whispered in her ear. "You're the sister, are you not? Go. Be seen. Tell them what you know about the girl." A hand pressed against her shoulder blade and gently nudged her forward. "Let's find out just how unreasonable the Commander can make himself look."

Dinah took one stumbling step, the movement drawing her attention back in to her own body and mind. It seemed Hawke had been correct that she never should have sent Suzandra away, but she did not know how she could possibly correct that mistake now. With nothing else to do, she attempted to follow the only instructions she had been given, as ambiguous as they were.

She approached the door and the people arguing by it. "Suzandra is not possessed," she said. "I may be able to explain her actions, if you will give me the chance."

Rutherford looked away from Trevelyan. When his eyes landed on Dinah, they went wide. For a moment, he did nothing but gape and shudder. Then he shoved Trevelyan to the side and lunged, sword-first, toward Dinah.

Before Dinah could react, someone jumped in front of her. They wore a purple cowl and a chain mail tunic, and that was all that Dinah could take stock of before the clang and scrape of metal on metal broke her thoughts.

"Have you completely lost your mind?" the interloper demanded as she turned aside Rutherford's sword with a pair of daggers. She spoke with the same voice that had whispered in Dinah's ear moments earlier. "How dare you lay hands on the Inquisitor?"

"There is no more time to waste!" Rutherford shouted back at her. "The apprentice has summoned demons!"

"Demons?" the strange woman asked. "You really are insane! There are no demons here!"

"Yes, there are! There! That specter right behind you!" Rutherford gestured wildly at Dinah. "Solona Amell is _not_ Tranquil! She is dead! I know this!"

"Dinah!" Suzandra twisted around in Hawke's grip, and this time Hawke let her go. She ran at Dinah and threw herself against her in an embrace. "What's wrong with you?" she shouted over her shoulder. "She's not a demon, and she isn't Solona either! Did you not even know that my mother had sisters?"

"Your mother?" The sword slipped from Rutherford's hands and clattered against the stone floor. "Your mother was... Solona?"

Suzandra buried her face against Dinah's chest and wailed. "Yes! Yes, you stupid, stupid Templar! She was! Now will you leave me alone?"

"I had no idea," said Rutherford. "Maker forgive me. I truly didn't know."

The strange woman kicked the dropped sword farther back into the tower, then sheathed her daggers, strolled past Rutherford, and went to help Trevelyan to her feet.

"I didn't kill her," Rutherford said to Suzandra. "I don't know where you heard that, but please, you must believe me. This was all a horrible misunderstanding."

"I don't care!" Suzandra yelled at him. "Just go away and leave me alone!"

"Thank you, Leliana," Trevelyan said as she stood. "Commander, I think you should go get some rest."

"I can't do that," Rutherford said. "There is so much I need to explain."

"Commander, you are dismissed," Trevelyan told him.

"Inquisitor, you don't understand," Rutherford said. "I am that girl's father."

"You are no such thing!" Suzandra screamed. "You're the worst! I hate you!"

"Whatever you may think of me, I am telling the truth," Rutherford told her.

"Commander, _you are dismissed_ ," Trevelyan repeated.

"But I can't just leave without—"

"Commander, the Inquisitor has given an order," Leliana said. "Am I going to have to enforce it for her?"

Rutherford went silent for a moment, then sighed heavily and said, "My apologies. That will not be necessary." He bowed his head to Trevelyan, then turned and marched off across the courtyard.

"That goes for the rest of you as well," Trevelyan told the soldiers gathered outside the door. "Disperse." Unlike their commander, they did not have to be told twice. When they had gone, Trevelyan turned to Leliana. "Please, please tell me that you know what went wrong here."

"I do have some background information you might find interesting," Leliana answered.

"Oh, thank goodness," said Trevelyan, then turned back toward the gathered mages. "Hawke? And... Dinah and Suzandra, was it? I need you to come with me so that we can discuss this all _privately_. Maker help me, if anyone tries to tell me we have to do the whole ceremony, I will set that hideous throne on fire."

—

The discussion went fairly well, considering. Suzandra explained how she had attempted to avenge her mother, but gotten scared at the last moment and forced her shot off course. Hawke explained how she had taken her eyes off of Suzandra when she really should not have. Leliana explained how she had intentionally provoked Rutherford into snapping entirely, in order to resolve the standoff. Dinah confirmed all of their stories. The Inquisitor seemed generally frustrated with the situation, but not angry at any of them in particular. She mentioned that the simplest solution might be to send Suzandra away from Skyhold, if they could just settle on a reasonably safe place to send her. When it came up that Suzandra had been planning to leave with Hawke and Dinah anyhow, everyone agreed that it now made sense to expedite that plan.

Mere hours later, the three of them set out from the fortress. The trek through the mountains proved a strenuous one, which might have gone some way toward explaining why Suzandra did not engage in her usual game of clambering over and jumping between boulders, but Dinah thought she seemed more disheartened than physically exhausted.

"All right," Hawke said when they reached a flat enough stretch of trail that they could walk and talk at the same time without depleting their breath, "now that it's just us, I'm going to need you to tell me _exactly_ what was going through your head."

"I'm sorry," said Suzandra.

"Don't worry about that," said Hawke. "Unbelievable as it may sound, I'm actually not angry."

"Just disappointed?" Suzandra guessed.

"Not that either," said Hawke. "Maybe I should be, but at this point in my life, I think I would be more disappointed if I ever befriended someone who _didn't_ immediately drag me into absurd amounts of trouble. I'm only asking because I'm responsible for you now, and apparently I need a better understanding than I currently have in order to not make a complete mess of things."

"Why would you say that?" Suzandra asked.

"Oh, I don't know," said Hawke. "Possibly because I left you alone for five minutes and you immediately attempted to kill the military commander of the Inquisition, then followed that up by attempting to kill yourself."

"None of that was your fault!" Suzandra said.

"Perhaps it was mine," Dinah suggested.

"No, it wasn't anyone's fault but mine!" Suzandra insisted. "I'm more trouble than I'm worth, and I always have been — except to Dinah, and that's just because everyone else is so much worse to her that she's stuck with me."

"I'm fairly sure 'more trouble than they're worth' is a phrase that's been used to describe everyone I've ever met who I consider worth knowing," said Hawke.

"Well, I'm not like them," said Suzandra. "I really am just useless and annoying. I tried really, really hard to not annoy _you_ , because I can't afford to chase you off like I do just about everyone else, and look how long I lasted before ruining _that_. I knew I would ruin it. _That's_ what was going through my head, if you really want to know. And then I realized that Dinah was probably trying to get rid of me, because soon she won't need me anymore either. She was just trying to be polite when she said it was the other way around, that she would be useless to me. And that's when I had the thought about destiny, because I can't just undo my whole existence, but I thought I could maybe actually get pretty close. It would be poetic, wouldn't it? Maybe poetic enough to justify my ever having been born at all. But I couldn't even do that right, because I kept thinking things like, 'What if I've guessed wrong, so this is just as pointless as everything else?' and, 'I wonder how they're going to kill me and what it's going to feel like,' and I panicked and ruined my chance."

"I would never want to get rid of you," Dinah told her. "That was not unrelated to the problem I discussed with Hawke, but in the opposite sense. I do not want to become someone unpleasant enough to make you feel unwanted. I do not want to chase you away, especially if you will have nowhere to run to. But it seems I have just done that, even without changing myself at all. Everything is very difficult, and I do not know what I should do."

"Obviously you should just take care of yourself and forget about me, because nothing you can do or say is going to keep me from being stupid!"

"You know," Hawke said after a beat of silence, "you really don't have to justify having been born. No one does. It's not like any of us asked to be."

"But I really, really shouldn't have been," insisted Suzandra. "Or at the very least, I shouldn't have gone looking for my mother. That was another stupid thing I did! Even if she were alive, she wouldn't want anything to do with me."

"There's no way of knowing that," said Hawke. "We can't exactly ask her."

Suzandra made a frustrated noise in her throat. "No fair! That's what _I_ was going to say if you tried to tell me that of course she would want to meet me!"

"So you'd already thought of that, but you somehow hadn't realized it's equally true both ways?" Hawke asked.

Suzandra's only response was another, louder frustrated noise.

"I admit that I do not know my younger sister very well," Dinah said. "There is much that I do not remember about her, and much of what I do remember might have changed in the years since I was taken away. I cannot begin to guess whether or not she would have wanted to be near you. But there is one thing I can say with some certainty: she would not have wanted you to punish yourself for something in which you had no choice. Only an especially cruel person would want that, and Solona was not such a person."

Suzandra latched on to Dinah's arm and stopped walking. Dinah stopped walking with her. Hawke, who was leading the way, did not stop until Suzandra began crying loudly, at which point she turned around and recrossed the distance she had put between them. "All right, looks like we're taking a break," she declared as she unshouldered the large pack she'd been carrying and then sat on top of it. She unhooked the flask from her belt and took a drink, then handed it over to Suzandra. "Careful there," she told her. "You've sprung a leak. Better refill before you collapse from thirst."

Suzandra sipped from the flask between sobs, occasionally pausing to cough. After a couple minutes, she handed it back and declared, "And now I've gone and used up all your water too."

"Not at all," said Hawke. "I can just pull more from the air. Look!" With her left hand she held the flask out beneath Suzandra's eye level, then waved her right hand beneath it. The vessel filled up to the neck with ice crystals. Hawke waved her hand again, and the crystals melted into water.

"Oh wow," said Suzandra, her voice cracking notably less than it had been just a moment earlier. "I've never seen anyone do that before!"

"It is similar to an enchantment with which I am familiar," said Dinah.

"Right, I know about that," said Suzandra. "There's those enchanted buckets that fill up on their own. So I guess I should have realized that obviously you could do the same thing with a spell, but for some reason it just never occurred to me."

"I'd imagine the reason is that the Circle doesn't like us using magic for day-to-day things," said Hawke. "Because the Chantry hates both fun _and_ practicality."

"I think it mostly just hates us," said Suzandra.

"Yes, that too."

Suzandra seemed to have calmed down considerably, so Dinah risked asking, "What was it about what I just said that upset you so? I was attempting to be helpful, but it seems that I missed the mark."

"You didn't," Suzandra told her. "I don't really know what I was thinking. It's just... you were being so nice to me, and you're always so nice to me, way nicer than anyone else, but it's because you have to be, and I _never_ know what to think or feel about any of that. And I guess you don't know what to think about it either, and me being weird about it is just making everything worse for you, and I should definitely stop, but I don't really know how to. But I guess I can promise not to jump to conclusions and try to die again, because I do know you like me enough that you can't do anything if you're worried about that, so not forgetting I know that is the least I can do. And also maybe the most I can do, because I'm so stupid and dramatic and bad at controlling myself and also at everything."

"Beating yourself up for beating yourself up seems a bit counterproductive," said Hawke.

"What am I supposed to do, then?" Suzandra asked.

"I'm not trying to tell you what to do," said Hawke. "I'm just making an observation. Here's another observation: you're a good kid. And another: you probably haven't been told that anywhere near often enough."

"I..." Suzandra trailed off into a heavy sigh. "... _really_ want to argue with that, but I guess I shouldn't. Any chance you could keep saying nice things to me even if I don't argue with them?"

"Well, let's see," said Hawke. "That was very honest of you. Honesty is a good thing!"

Suzandra buried her face in her hands. "I think I made a mistake."

"Dinah was just telling me earlier how thoughtful and helpful to her you are," Hawke continued. "I'm definitely seeing that now!"

Suzandra looked up at Dinah, eyes wide. "Really?"

Dinah nodded.

"And you've got a sense for justice," Hawke added. "Somewhat overzealously so, and maybe not always perfectly aimed, but that's how it tends to go, in my experience. At any rate, it's better than not caring at all. I think." She paused a beat and frowned. "Should I be encouraging that? Maybe I shouldn't be encouraging that. I really don't know what I'm doing. Let this be a lesson to you, Suzandra: _none_ of us ever really know what we're doing."

"You know, I thought you were supposed to be actually funny," said Suzandra. "In person, you're really just kind of awkward and rambly."

"Surprise!" said Hawke. "That's the real secret of my charm!"

In spite of what she had just said, Suzandra laughed.

—

They did not make it to Hawke's base before sunset, but Trevelyan had sent them off with plenty of food, and Hawke had brought along other supplies, so camping out for the night was not uncomfortable.

Early the following morning, before they had even broken camp, one of the Inquisition's ravens flew in with a message. Hawke took the letter from its leg and read it, while Suzandra tore her breakfast sausage into small pieces and tossed them out one by one at various distances to watch the bird hop and flutter around eating them all.

"Well, that's not _great_ news," Hawke said when she had finished. She lit up her hands and incinerated the parchment, then stomped out the smoldering ashes that fell at her feet. "Cullen Rutherford has resigned from his post."

"Good," said Suzandra. "He never should have had it in the first place."

"That part _is_ pretty great," Hawke clarified. "And also to be expected, after the way he acted toward the Inquisitor right out in the open in front of everyone. Problem is, the spymaster thinks he might try to follow us."

"Oh," said Suzandra. Her grip on her food must have loosened, because the raven swooped in and grabbed the remainder of the sausage from her hands, then flew off back toward Skyhold. "Aw, I guess the birdie wasn't enjoying that game as much as I was."

"Or maybe he just thinks stealing is even _more_ fun," Hawke suggested. "Now, forgive me for returning to a much less pleasant topic than either animals or petty crime, but do either of you have unaccounted for phylacteries?"

"No, they should both have been destroyed when Jainen's Circle was liberated," Dinah told her.

"That's good at least," said Hawke. "So if we can give him the slip here, we should be home free. Not sure we'll manage that, though. It couldn't have been too difficult for him to find out the general direction we left in. And the way these windy mountain paths go, we may not even be out of spyglass view from Skyhold, let alone anywhere else he might choose to search from."

"What should we do?" Suzandra asked.

"Get to the base as quickly as possible," Hawke said decisively. "I have a couple surprises waiting there that should be useful if we wind up in a confrontation."

They packed up everything in a hurry, and then traveled on in a hurry as well. The pace that Hawke tried to set at first was too much for either Suzandra or Dinah, and even when she slowed down a bit they were left without any breath to spare for talking. When she suddenly stopped, it took Suzandra a minute or so of panting before she could blurt out, "Are we there?"

"Unfortunately, no," Hawke said. She pointed down the mountain to a lower slope they had climbed earlier, and Dinah looked to see someone climbing after them.

"Is that him?" Suzandra asked. "He's not in the Commander-y armor, but I guess he wouldn't be now."

Hawke was already pulling a spyglass out of her pack. The moment she looked through it, she confirmed, "It's him. And if we can see him, he can see us."

"What should we do?" Dinah asked.

"Well, I _might_ be able to take him out from here," said Hawke. "But even if it worked, it would be... flashy. After what happened yesterday, I'm not sure I want to risk that."

"I'm sorry," said Suzandra. "And I'm sorry I'm so slow, too! He's going to catch up to us in no time, and it's all my fault!"

"I am as slow as you are," Dinah pointed out.

"It's all right," said Hawke. "If we can just keep up the pace we've been going at, we should still be able to make it."

"I don't know if I _can_ keep up the pace," Suzandra said, sounding near tears.

"It won't be much longer," Hawke assured her. "You know, one of the 'surprises' I mentioned is my dog. You should definitely meet my dog. He's a much better sport than that raven. If you want to play fetch with him, he'll play until your arm falls off."

"You're weird," said Suzandra. "You're really not going to yell at me or threaten me no matter how much trouble I cause you?"

"It's not as though breaking down crying will help you move faster," Hawke pointed out.

"So are you going to punish me later, then?"

"No, I can't see that helping anything either."

"You're _super_ weird," said Suzandra. "But I shouldn't waste any more time saying so. Let's go."

—

As Hawke had said, it did not take them long after that to reach her "base," which turned out to be a cave. Hawke whistled a short tune at the entrance, and was greeted by an explosion of barking and a very large dog rushing out and jumping up to rest his paws on her shoulders as he licked her face. Dinah wondered how he did not knock her down, and also how the smell was not extremely unpleasant, but Hawke seemed happy to see him. Suzandra, panting and doubled over with her hands on her knees, seemed too exhausted to be happy.

From inside the cave there came another sound that Dinah did not know how to classify, followed by a loud meow. Hawke pushed the dog off of her and said, "All right, we're going in," then summoned a wisp to light the way.

The cave entrance was narrow and led to a long, branching path like a hallway. When Hawke led them to turn down one of the branches, though, they found it opened into a spacious, high-ceilinged cavern where the stone floor was lined by animal-skin rugs, and the corners were piled with bags full of food and clothes and other supplies. Someone had hammered some rudimentary torch-holders into the walls, and Hawke lit the torches with her magic and then sent the wisp away.

"Like I signaled, we're being followed," Hawke said to the room at large as she dumped her pack on the floor. "But we should have at least a few minutes to debrief. Let's see, where to start? Well, this is my second cousin, Dinah Amell, and my second cousin once removed, Suzandra Amell. They're aunt and niece, by the way."

"Nice to meet you?" Suzandra said uncertainly to the dog.

"As for the Inquisition... Well, it's not as bad as the name suggests, at any rate. Fiona seems more optimistic about it than I've ever seen her be about any other Chantry-affiliated institution — which I know isn't saying much, but I mean by a wide margin. The Inquisitor herself seems like a good person, and I don't mean in the sense of being a 'good mage'. She's definitely in over her head, but who isn't?"

"Er, I know Mabari hounds are supposed to be smart," Suzandra cut in, "but do they really understand _politics_?"

"I'm not talking to the dog," said Hawke. "I'm talking to the cat."

There was another meow, and Dinah looked down to find a large yellow tabby nuzzling against Hawke's shins.

"I see," said Suzandra, though she did not sound any less confused.

"Anyhow," said Hawke, "Rutherford was the Seeker's idea. Trevelyan wasn't happy with that, but up until now wasn't able to do anything about it. Your old commander's girlfriend doesn't like him either, and she actually got him to resign shortly after we left, then sent me a raven warning he might be following us, which it turns out he is. So she seems pretty trustworthy, as far as spies go."

The cat thrashed its tail.

Hawke continued talking, apparently to the cat, while Dinah and Suzandra sat down on the rugs to rest. They downed multiple canteens worth of water between them, which Hawke helpfully refilled without pausing in her debrief. She had gotten to the topic of Corypheus — "I had to leave before I made much progress there, but I at least got them in touch with Stroud, so with any luck it won't be a complete disaster even if I don't manage to get back to them any time soon." — when the dog started to growl.

"There goes the Templar alarm," Hawke said. "Our guest must be close. Suzandra, Dinah, you can stay back here if you'd rather not see him, or follow me if you have any last questions you want answered. Just keep behind me."

Hawke and her animals left the cavern. After a moment's hesitation, Suzandra followed her, and Dinah followed Suzandra. The two of them hung back in the shadows while Hawke positioned herself in the cave's mouth and stood firm like a locked and bolted door.

It did not take long for Rutherford to come up the slope and into view. "Hello, Hawke," he said as he reached her.

"Hello, Knight-Captain,"said Hawke.

"You can stop calling me that any day now," said Rutherford. "I haven't been that man for several years."

Hawke snorted. "Oh yes, that's right: I've heard you have some very non-specific regrets about your time overseeing the Gallows."

"How are they non-specific?" With Hawke standing in the way, Dinah could not see Rutherford's face, and she had difficulty discerning from his voice alone whether he was angry or just frustrated and confused.

"How are they _not_?" Hawke asked. "But maybe I've heard wrong. Enlighten me: what would you do differently, if you could do it all over?"

"I would relieve Knight-Commander Stannard of her office far earlier, obviously."

"Not a bad start. And then what?"

"What do you want to hear from me? That I would have let the mages go free and thumbed my nose at the Revered Mother? I would have been the Knight-Commander, and it would have fallen to me to run the Gallows as a Circle ought to be run."

"And how ought a Circle to be run, Knight-Captain? I asked you what _specifically_ you would change."

"Do you expect me to go into all the administrative minutia here and now? I can't give you that level of detail about something so hypothetical."

Dinah supposed that Rutherford really must have been merely frustrated earlier, because the intensity of the emotion in his voice had grown considerably, and by now he sounded angry but not necessarily furious.

"Oh, my mistake," said Hawke, who did not sound at all concerned by Rutherford's temper. "I'd thought you must have wanted to overturn some of Meredith Stannard's policies, but I guess it was just her personality that you had a problem with."

"Her personality was no small issue! Anyone less completely unhinged would have responded to the Revered Mother's murder by working ceaselessly to bring her killer to justice, not by running off to enact her own hideous agenda. But I don't imagine you would have liked that very much either."

"Well, I _am_ generally against the indiscriminate slaughter of hundreds of innocent people—" Hawke began.

"I hadn't noticed," Rutherford cut in.

"Then either you are _very_ bad at counting, or you have a different definition of 'innocent' than I do. In any case, I think I'm starting to get the picture. If you had so few issues with the way the Gallows was run, of course you wouldn't want it destroyed! I'm sure you'd have preferred if things had just continued on the way they were forever, with all the torture and isolation, to say nothing of the less official—" Hawke broke off and snapped her fingers. "Oh, that's right! I _did_ hear you voice a dissenting opinion once! The Knight-Commander seemed perfectly content to let her unsanctioned use of the Tranquil brand remain unsanctioned, but _you_ were openly saying it ought to be applied much more often, even after she'd shot down Alrik's proposal."

Dinah felt suddenly strange in a way that she could not define. The feeling seemed to begin with the mention of the name Alrik, but that made no sense, because she did not recognize that name at all. If she thought too hard about it, though, it would likely distract her from following the conversation, so she did her best to ignore it.

"I said nothing about 'ought to,'" Rutherford argued. "I only said that there was a case to made."

"Fine, fine," said Hawke. "But even so, Stannard clearly had no intention of making it. Is that what you would have done differently as Knight-Commander, Knight-Captain? Made your case to the Chantry that they ought to allow you to burn out the brains of any mage you pleased?"

"Enough!" Rutherford snapped. "I came here for a reason, Hawke, and that reason was _not_ to get caught up in your nonsense. Where is Suzandra?"

"So much for being a different man," Hawke scoffed. "I was under the impression you'd fallen out of the habit of stealing children."

"You're the one who's trying to steal her! She is my daughter, Hawke. I just want a chance to talk with her."

"And what if she doesn't want to talk with you?"

"Then she doesn't understand! How could she possibly understand? She is only a little girl. You have to give me a chance to explain it to her."

"I don't have to do anything," said Hawke. "And I'm not sure why you're so worked up about this now when you were perfectly all right with not talking to her for twelve years."

"I was a bit preoccupied, as you well know! But things are different now. I have resigned from my post as the Inquisition's military commander. It... seemed in everyone's best interest for me to retire. I am about to head home to my family — which is also Suzandra's family."

"You can't seriously think you're going to take me with you!" Suzandra shouted, striding forward into the light shining through from the entrance. "I'm already with what's left of my family after you people got done with them!"

"Don't worry," Hawke assured her. "I won't let him."

"Suzandra," Rutherford said. His tone grew suddenly much gentler. Dinah did not like it one bit. In fact, she could not remember the last time she had disliked something so strongly. Though, to be fair, she was now actively trying not to remember. "There you are at last. Maker, you _do_ look like your mother, right down to that intensity in your eyes."

"I am glaring at you because I hate you and want you to leave!" Suzandra yelled.

"Well, you heard her," said Hawke. "Good day, Knight-Captain."

"I really am your father, Suzandra," Rutherford said, craning his neck to look past Hawke's shoulder. "I was with Solona at Kinloch Hold. We obviously weren't married, but I cared for her very much. That's how it happens, sometimes."

"You really want to convince me?" Suzandra asked. "Tell me what she was like!"

"Beautiful," Rutherford said automatically. "Beautiful, charismatic, intelligent, and bold. Perhaps a bit _too_ bold, in the end."

"What was her favorite food?" Suzandra asked.

Rutherford laughed a bit sheepishly. "I couldn't tell you, I'm afraid."

She had once liked fresh fruit, Dinah remembered. Which was a shame, because there had never been much of that in the Circle.

"What was her favorite color?" Suzandra pressed on. "Or her favorite word game?"

"Word game?" Cullen asked. "Who has a favorite word game?"

Most of the mages from Jainen's Circle had one, and Levin had made it sound as though Calenhad was much the same way. He'd said he and Solona had played Fortunately, Unfortunately when they wanted to think and were in the mood for dark humor, and Last Letters First when they really, really didn't and weren't.

"How many siblings did she remember having?" Suzandra continued. "What did she think about theology?"

"If he couldn't even get the easy ones after living in the same building as her," Hawke broke in, "I don't see how he'll get those."

Rutherford did not contradict her.

"Can you name even one thing she liked?" Suzandra demanded. "Or one thing she didn't like?"

"Ah," said Rutherford. With his face tilted the way it was, Dinah could see him blushing. She wished Hawke would hide him from her again. "I _c_ _an_ but... not anything I could tell you about, off the top of my head. Give me a moment to think."

"You aren't my father," Suzandra told him.

"Suzandra, please listen to—"

"You aren't my father!" Suzandra repeated. "You're just the Templar that raped my mother! That doesn't make you family!"

" _What_?!" Rutherford's face went even redder. "I am _not..._ I would _never_... " He turned back to Hawke. "What nonsense have you been filling her head with?"

There it was: outright fury. It was terrifying.

Dinah noticed her legs had gone weak when her knees hit the ground. What was happening to her? She felt as though she were not entirely inside herself. She had not been entirely inside herself for some time, she realized, but this was different. Before, a part of her had simply been cut off. Now she could feel that part being stretched between her body and some point just in front of her.

"I didn't tell her anything," Hawke said. She somehow didn't sound scared at all, even with Rutherford screaming in her face.

"I didn't need anyone to tell me!" said Suzandra, who sounded too angry to be scared. "I'm already twelve, and I'm not stupid!"

"Maker's breath," said Rutherford, "what were the mages in your Circle teaching you?"

"What she would need to know to survive, I'd imagine," said Hawke.

"It wasn't like that," Rutherford said. "Between Solona and myself, I mean."

"Of course it was," said Hawke. "You were her jailer. For it to even possibly have not been like that, you would have had to have been paying _very_ careful attention to what she wanted and why. Instead, it sounds like you were actively avoiding learning anything about how she felt."

"You're wrong," Rutherford insisted. "You don't have any idea what you're talking about, do you? I was at the Gallows! I... saw more than I wanted to there. Far, far more than I ever wanted to. This wasn't like that!"

"Aren't you being a bit overdramatic?" Hawke asked. "After all, it was only _administrative minutia_." Which was a strange thing to say, but Dinah could not think about what she meant by it, because all she could think of was how nothing was ever exactly like anything else. Some of the Templars who used you wanted to hurt you for the sake of hurting you, and some just got frustrated because you didn't react to anything _but_ physical pain, and some didn't care how you reacted as long as you didn't resist. Dinah hadn't been able to avoid all of them forever, so she'd decided that last sort was usually worth humoring.

Solona had not been Tranquil, but she had not been stupid either. When she'd tried to flee, Rutherford had blocked her way or even grabbed her tightly enough to hurt her. When she'd tried to talk him down, he had ignored her. What more could she have done? Scream? Fight? The last thing she'd wanted to do was antagonize him. Dinah did not think Rutherford seemed like the type who would enjoy beating someone into submission, but she would not bet her life on that. And he _did_ seem like the type to take rejection as a personal insult or a sign of a mage losing her mind. Wasn't that more or less what had happened when Solona had finally shown her hand?

Levin had sounded so distant and subdued when he'd told Dinah all of that. He'd sounded almost Tranquil himself. He had told her how Solona had clung to his arm and cried, and how strange that had felt, since he'd always been the crier back when they'd been children.

Though she had not thought of it at the time, Dinah remembered now that _she_ had seen Solona cry like that when _they_ had been children together. One twin on each of her arms when Emilia had been taken, and again when their mother had disappeared. One twin on each of their father's arms when the irons had closed around Dinah's own wrists.

Everyone had been arguing for a while. Dinah had failed to follow it. The next thing she heard properly was Suzandra shouting, "No, you _didn't_ know anything about her! You didn't even know that she was an invert!"

" _Who has been teaching you these words_?!" Rutherford bellowed.

"That is extremely not the problem here," Hawke said.

But it was the problem from his perspective, wasn't it? He did not want to hear how he had been wrong, so he hated that someone had been rude enough to tell his daughter what she needed to know to explain it to him.

"Solona was not... that," Rutherford insisted. "I know perfectly well that she could be less than discriminate, but that doesn't make her a... What am I saying? I should not be saying any of this to a child! I should never have let you be raised by anyone who would say it to a child! What is _wrong_ with mages?"

"What's wrong with _you_?" Suzandra shot back. "Her friend who knew her a lot better than you did told me she didn't like men, and that doesn't concern you at all?"

"If she were really indiscriminate," said Hawke, "why would you and she and everyone who knew her be so convinced that you're the father?"

"I didn't mean..." Rutherford stuttered. "That was different. _I_ was different. You want to hear one thing she liked? She liked _me_. I know she did, because I found her diary after she passed, and the time we'd spent together was all she ever wrote about."

"You found _that_?!" Dinah was on her feet, staggering forward although her head spun and her legs shook. "That was not a diary! It was a dead drop!"

"What are you—" Rutherford began, but Dinah was done listening to him. She shouted over him, though her voice strained her throat.

"She tried to get the First Enchanter to help her, but he just reminded her that you would say she had tempted you, maybe even used blood magic, that _she_ was taking advantage of _you_ , and no one would believe her. And he reminded her she _should_ take advantage, if she could. Keep you happy. Get you in her pocket. But everything scared her, and all she could think to do was try to make the sort of evidence that someone might at least believe if she were dead and had nothing to gain. A threat to keep you in line if things went bad, and a chance at justice if threats failed to work. But all that was useless when you decided to turn yourself in, and Levin slept on that thing for almost a year because he didn't know what he was supposed to do with it now. You idiot! You selfish, vain idiot! You _really_ think she'd keep a diary and have nothing to write about but you?"

The cat yowled, and Dinah remembered that he was there and looked down at him, and suddenly everything made sense, except in all of the ways it still didn't.

"It is in the cat," she said. "The Fade is in the cat. It can barely keep it all under its skin. Does everyone see this, or am I crazy? _Am_ I crazy? I don't feel well at all!"

"Get back!" Rutherford shouted. "That is _not_ a Tranquil!" He moved his hand to the hilt of his sword, but before he could draw it, Hawke summoned a gauntlet of stone around her fist and slammed it into his face.

Rutherford staggered backward with blood spraying from his nose. The dog lunged forward and sunk his teeth into Rutherford's leg, dragging him further off-balance. The cat darted out from the cave, slipping past the others with little difficulty thanks to its small size. When it had gotten a few yards away, there was another sound like the one Dinah had heard when they had first arrived at the cave, and then the cat was a man. The man had a staff that he aimed at Rutherford, and a stream of shining blue-white frost magic flowed from it and solidified into a block of ice around Rutherford's head. Rutherford gave up on trying to draw his sword and instead brought his hands up to his face, but before he could cleanse the ice away, Hawke rammed into him with her shoulder and knocked him off his feet. She followed him to the ground, and Dinah saw the knife in her hand, and then there was even more blood and Rutherford stopped moving.

Suzandra was screaming. It took Dinah a moment to notice, because she was screaming too. She held out a hand and brushed the girl's shoulder, and Suzandra spun around and latched on to her outstretched arm with both hands.

"Anders, that probably wasn't the best way to reintroduce her to having feelings," Hawke said.

"I'm sorry," said the man who had been a cat. He approached Hawke and reached down to help her up from the ground. "I tried to control it, but everything kept escalating with no sign of stopping. Why did you let him talk for that long?"

"Because the kid is here, and the absolute last thing she needs is to ever have to wonder if he deserved it."

"I see," said Anders. "It was a trial of sorts. You let his own words convict him. I should have been more patient."

"No, it's completely unsurprising that you weren't able to," said Hawke. "I'm sorry. I should have thought that part through and used some of our debrief time to warn you better, or maybe just told them to stay back and not watch."

"I wouldn't have listened anyway!" Suzandra called out to them. "It's my fault! It's always my fault! I should just—"

Dinah wrapped her free arm around her and pulled her closer, and Suzandra stopped screaming and started sniffling.

"There is no best way," Dinah said. "It is too much. It was always going to be too much. But it is also not enough, and the not enough is also too much. I want to hold you tighter."

"You can!" said Suzandra. "I don't mind!"

"Not tight enough," said Dinah. "I want to hold my little sister, and I cannot. I want to hold Cadence, and I cannot. I did not want this. I wanted to die even less, but I never wanted this. Now I do not even know which I want less. Everything is too much, and I don't ever want it to stop for any reason."

"When it stops, I'll bring it back," Anders told her. "I can bring it back to stay, if you're ready. You don't need to worry about that."

"How do I not worry?" Dinah asked. "I never could not worry, even back before, even knowing I had no right because it was my choice even if they made me choose. But I was still so scared. I only did not fight it _because_ I was so scared." They'd had her fast and hold vigil through the night and day before, and even when her stomach had pinched in on itself and her head had felt full of heat and fog she hadn't complained, because if they thought she wasn't cooperating they would do it the hard way instead. Near the end it hurt enough that she couldn't think about what was coming, but then she saw the brand and couldn't _not_ think about it, and by then they'd chained her down and stretched her out and trying to move anything but her head made the edges of the shackles cut into her wrists and ankles, and then they held her head and there was nothing at all that she could do, not even scream, because her chest felt stretched out too and her voice refused to do anything but whimper pathetically. She _must_ have screamed when the burning started, but she couldn't remember for sure, because all she remembered was the pain and the smell of her own skin and blood on the smoke.

"What's going on? Dinah, what's wrong? Are you all right? Hawke, is she going to be all right?"

"Well, this _is_ generally what happens when someone wakes up from being Tranquil for years, and in my experience, they're eventually at least more all right than at the start."

Dinah realized she was screaming again, and tried to at least force the screams to make words. "It hurts so much! It always hurt, and I somehow did not notice! And that should have made it all right but it did not, even when I thought it did, and I cannot even explain what I mean but please believe me, please do not tell me it is nonsense, please do not make me go back!"

"It's okay," Suzandra told her. "They already said they wouldn't."

"I know that, but I am still scared!"

"I can keep telling you! Would that help?"

"It will not! I can't stop screaming!"

"Then I'll scream with you! Everything _is_ too much! I did everything I wanted to do, but I don't feel like I'm at the end of anything! I've got to keep on doing more, and I don't even know more of _what_! It wasn't even fun watching him die, because now I know what people dying looks like, and I can't stop thinking about it looking like that on people I _don't_ hate! And I guess it's good that he can't keep making things worse, but nothing is actually any _better_! Why did I think that something would feel better?!"

"Sometimes not worse is the best better you get," said Hawke.

Before she knew what she was doing, Dinah had stopped screaming and started laughing. "This is ridiculous," she said. "It is... absurd." She remembered Suzandra laughing earlier about not finding Hawke funny, and how little sense it had made at the time. It still did not make sense, but now she was laughing too, and that did not make sense either and was happening anyway.

She realized she had probably been squeezing too tightly and relaxed her grip. Suzandra immediately responded by pulling her arms free and hugging her back. Dinah had held her niece many times, but now it struck her as it never had before just how small the girl was. A thin, precious bundle of warmth.

"I wish I could protect you," Dinah said.

"Can you at least love me?" Suzandra asked.

"I do," Dinah said without hesitation. She thought that maybe, in a way she still found too confusing and overwhelming to even attempt to explain, just like the pain, that had been true even when she had been numb to it.


End file.
